"One of the most lopsided and unfair transactions in the annals of United States history," is how libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week describes the government's seizure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from their shareholders.

"How the Left Spun Kennedy" is the headline on a piece I wrote for the Daily Beast drawing on some material from my new book JFK, Conservative.

There's more recent coverage of the book at Forbes.com (here) and Ha'aretz (here).

In the course of its news article on President Obama's tepid quasi-apology for his "if you like your plan, you can keep it" falsehood, the New York Times reports this comment:

"We know that lying to Congress is a crime, but unfortunately, lying to the American people is not," Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said Wednesday during a congressional hearing on Capitol Hill.

The Times does not point out that Mr. Obama actually made the "if you like your plan, you can keep it" claim at least twice in remarks directed at Congress.

On September 9, 2009, in "Remarks by the President to a Joint Session of Congress on Health Care," Mr. Obama said:

Here's a brief YouTube video of the Country Music Awards bit making fun of ObamaCare.

"Loyal Obama Supporters, Canceled by ObamaCare" is the headline ProPublica put over its illuminating dispatch about a San Francisco couple who volunteered at the phone bank for Obama's re-election and now are going to be worse off because of ObamaCare. They "have been paying $550 a month for their health coverage — a plan that offers solid coverage, not one of the skimpy plans Obama has criticized," ProPublica reports. "But recently, Kaiser informed them the plan would be canceled at the end of the year because it did not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The couple would need to find another one. The cost would be around double what they pay now, but the benefits would be worse."

ProPublica has a follow-up article today about the case. One key point stands:

Pretty grim news this post-election morning. In New York, a great capitalist city, a pro-Sandinista tax-the-rich type, Bill de Blasio, has been elected mayor. In Boston, a vast expenditure by labor unions has thrust a union official into the mayoralty. In New Jersey, the victory of Chris Christie may give some reassurance to those who favor restraints on government expenditures and a hard line against public employee unions, but those of us who are concerned by Governor Christie's dictatorial tendencies now have to reckon with him as a strengthened force headed into 2016. The one real bright spot is Colorado, where, the Denver Post reports, voters "emphatically" rejected a $950 million tax increase (ostensibly for education) that had the backing of Michael Bloomberg, the National Education Association (a teachers union), and Bill and Melinda Gates. The tax increase would have raised income taxes in Colorado to 5% on income under $75,000 a year and to 5.9% on income above $75,000 a year, from the current flat 4.63% rate.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about ObamaCare:

the structural rot will only deepen. The broken websites are a sideshow. Mark these words: the breakdown in the individual insurance market is only a small foretaste of the total chaos from mass insurance cancellations that will come when and if the employer mandates go into effect.

The Washington Examiner's Sean Higgins fact-checks Politifact's coverage of President Obama's ObamaCare "If you like your plan, you can keep it" promise, and finds it wanting: "Apparently, Politifact thinks accountability is something that only applies to other people."

Hillary Clinton's paid speeches to Goldman Sachs are the subject of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

NPR has a feature called Double Take 'Toons that claims to offer "two opposing political cartoons on today's news." The "opposing" views in today's installment are one that says Republicans are giving too much away in "corporate subsidies for the rich" and other that says President Obama's economic policy is giving too much to the "top 1%." The views aren't actually "opposing" at all, in fact — they are quite similar in their attack on the rich and in their suggestion that the rich get rich not by hard work or providing value by simply by benefiting from government policies and programs. That this stuff is being put out by NPR, which is itself government funded, is ironic.

From Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, in an interview with the New York Times:

Affordable health care means trying to get more people insurance that had no insurance. Making people who had insurance buy a different product that costs more for less coverage? You can't go home and defend that.

How a reduction in food stamp benefits would affect retailers is the subject of an illuminating dispatch in today's Wall Street Journal.

Highlights:

Wal-Mart estimates it rakes in about 18% of total U.S. outlays on food stamps. That would mean it pulled in $14 billion of the $80 billion the USDA says was appropriated for food stamps in the year ended in September 2012.

People tend to think of food stamps as being money in the pockets of poor hungry people, but it turns out the money ends up in the pockets of the owners of Walmart, i.e., the Walton family, who are some of America's richest. It's somewhat similar to how Pell Grant money, billed as aid to poor college students, winds up in the pockets of relatively well-off professors. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it isn't often mentioned in the political debates over spending on these programs.

More:

The New York Times has an illuminating dispatch, well-timed to Halloween, about the federal sugar program, which the paper describes as "a combination of import restrictions, production quotas and loan programs dating to the 1930s, all designed to keep the price of American sugar well above that of the world market."

"Opponents of the program say they hope that the $300 million the federal government will spend this year to buy excess sugar will prompt lawmakers to re-examine it," the Times reports.

Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, has posted the text of his speech to the Heritage Foundation on "What's Next for Conservatives."

New York magazine has posted a brilliant — and I mean brilliant — collection of video clips (embedded below) of President Obama promising, in selling ObamaCare, that if people like their private insurance plans, they will be able to keep them, a promise that turns out to have been totally bogus. The video is credited to Abraham Riesman, who is pretty sharp and who passed through the New York Sun newsroom back in the day.