For the second year in a row, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern DIstrict of New York, Preet Bharara, attended the Vanity Fair Oscars party. (The New York Post has the 2015 news; the New York Times reported the 2014 news.) In 2014, Mr. Bharara had explained his attendance by saying that an Oscar-nominated movie was based on one of his office's cases. I've seen no explanation yet for this year's appearance. It certainly makes it possible for people to interpret Mr. Bharara's prosecutorial zeal against so-called insider traders as somehow associated with the political opinions of the Vanity Fair editor, Graydon Carter, who wrote, "the disconnect between the country's richest and its most downtrodden is looking very much the way it did during the first Gilded Age, in the late 1800s...Like grubs, slugs, and moles, Goldman prefers to work in the dark."

Foreign policy isn't our usual concentration here, but this scathing column by the editor of the Washington Post editorial page, Fred Hiatt, is worth making an exception:

By most measures, though, the world has not become safer during Obama's tenure. Islamist extremists are stronger than ever; democracy is in retreat around the globe...allies are questioning U.S. steadfastness.

John Carney reports in the Wall Street Journal's "Heard on the Street" column:

Fannie Mae isn't the immensely profitable company some of its biggest investors hoped it would be.
Despite a sizable increase in the fees Fannie charges for its mortgage guarantees, the company on Friday reported fourth-quarter net income of $1.3 billion, down 80% from a year earlier. Revenue fell 21% to $5.5 billion...

the results severely undercut the argument that a 2012 change to the company's bailout, which allows the government to sweep substantially all of Fannie's profits, amounts to an illegal expropriation. In fact, Fannie's quarterly payout to the Treasury would have been about $1 billion higher under the bailout's original terms. And to date, the internal rate of return to the Treasury on the bailout of Fannie is an unimpressive 5.6%.

It's been the snowiest month on record here in Boston, which for me was a chance to curl up in front of the computer and re-read some of the climate-change coverage in the New York Times, which is almost as funny, in a dark way, as the 40th anniversary program of "Saturday Night Live." This is the topic of my column this week; please check it out at the New York Sun (here) and Reason (here).

Gretchen Morgenson has a pretty good column in Sunday's Times about how the government is asserting presidential privilege to try to keep secret the records of its deliberations over seizing the profits of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

In a Jan. 28 letter to investors, Bruce Berkowitz, Fairholme's managing member, questioned the broad sweep of the government's claims to secrecy.

"Why are F.H.F.A. and, particularly, Treasury resisting discovery so fiercely?" he wrote. "Is it because the document trail directly implicates some of the president's most senior advisers in the White House?"

Fairholme officials and their lawyers declined to comment further about the case.

The question that Mr. Berkowitz raised is more than fair...

The Authors Guild (of which I used to be a member until President Obama effectively shut down its ability to offer health insurance to authors) and the group Authors United have been pressing the Justice Department to take antitrust action against Amazon.com. Now it looks like there's a possibility that Amazon may face some additional competition in the free market, without any government action.

Jet.com, a site that plans to compete with Amazon in the online shopping space, has raised a reported $220 million pre-launch for its site, which is promising the lowest prices on the web to shoppers who pay a $50 annual membership fee. The idea, the founder told Re/Code, is to do to Amazon what Costco did to Walmart.

The New York Times reports:

More than a dozen New York City buildings inspectors and clerks have been charged with exploiting their positions as gateways to the city's booming real estate industry to obtain hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, law enforcement officials announced on Tuesday.

This seems to be a recurring problem, and is a wonderful (or horrible, depending on how you look at it) example of the rule that it is the regulation that creates the opportunity for the corruption. One reason to be for smaller government is that it would be more honest, because there would be fewer opportunities for shakedowns.

Some background on past problems:

In my column this week, I suggest some questions for Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith to ask Obama in their sit-down interview. Please check the column out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

For a graphic representation of the difference between private property ownership and government ownership, it's hard to do much better than this photograph I took yesterday, which you might call "where the sidewalk ends."

The Sacramento Bee has a sad postscript to the scandal at the California state pension fund, Calpers — a report of the apparent suicide of a former Calpers board member, Alfred Villalobos, at a Reno, Nevada shooting range. Reports the Bee:

Villalobos amassed great wealth from his dealings with the California Public Employees' Retirement System, earning $50 million in commissions off the pension fund investments he brokered for his big Wall Street clients. But after the state of California named him in a civil suit in 2010, claiming he bribed his way to his millions, he filed for bankruptcy protection and watched as court officials systematically liquidated his treasures to pay his debts.

His Lake Tahoe mansion was sold, along with a vacation home in Hawaii. Out went the fancy wine collection and the multimillion-dollar art collection.

David Frum, himself an immigrant from Canada, made a recent appearance on the Laura Ingraham show in which he faults Jeb Bush for talking about the advantages of immigration to America. Said Mr. Frum:

Americans for Tax Reform says that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady will owe both income tax and gift tax on the Chevy that he won as Super Bowl MVP and that he says he will give to a teammate. The taxes, the group said, will be about $18,500, or more than half the value of the truck.

The latest installment in the "Conversations With Bill Kristol" series is an interview with Frederick W. Kagan, who talks about his work at the American Enterprise Institute with the U.S military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Kagan, a Yale graduate who taught at West Point, had this to say about the differences between those institutions:

This I think is so important as compared to the experience of your average Yalie, speaking as a Yalie, or a Cantabrigian has. You know, I mean, I think a lot of people go through Yale and Harvard and Princeton and never fail at anything. And I think it runs the risk of making them fragile.

No one graduates from West Point without having failed multiple times and badly because it's designed to make them fail. And then to have them see that you can recover from that and to build the muscle memory for how to recover from failure and how to react to it so that they're generally much more resilient, much less fragile people for having had that experience.

Don't underestimate Jeb Bush is the point I've been making here, and Governor Bush is making me look sagacious with a humdinger of a speech today at the Detroit Economic Club that seems to really grasp the substance of the economic issues in a way that I find both encouraging and refreshing. Some excerpts from the remarks as prepared for delivery:

America is a place where, as Lincoln dreamed, any person "may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year…and the next, work for himself… and finally, to hire men to work for him!"

America, though discouraged, has not given up on the dream of Lincoln.

The dream of Lincoln is alive at 5 a.m. at a bus depot in a distant suburb or in an inner city as workers get to jobs in hotels and restaurants and hospitals.

The dream is alive in the breath of a construction worker running cable under a city street in the bitter night air.

The dream is alive in the college student driving an Uber car part-time to graduate debt-free....

Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president and Treasury secretary, has a lively op-ed in the Crimson on the subject of Harvard, Israel, and how educational institutions should conduct themselves:

In 2012, a Vice Provost of the University was the keynote speaker and "Harvard guest" at the Harvard Arab Alumni Association's conference in Damascus. Conference materials made clear that the conference's patron was The First Lady of Syria, who was described as "an...inspiring and tireless leader...[who] supports President Assad by fostering the emergence of a robust, independent, and self-sustaining society." Since that time the Assad government has killed several hundred thousands of its citizens and been recognized as an exporter of terrorism.