Not a single one of the 60 baseball "experts" at Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and Baseball America predicted a Red Sox-Cardinals World Series. The need for skepticism about expert predictions is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

The Boston Globe carries a Farah Stockman column about the ridiculous amount of bureaucratic red tape someone who wants to open a restaurant in Boston must endure:

More burdensome than the money is the time. Many new restaurant owners hire lawyers to navigate paperwork, driving up costs even more.

In Chicago, Wu and her family just put a sign in the window and opened. But in Boston, they would have had to get approval from a neighborhood board. In Chicago, they held open mic poetry nights to attract customers. In Boston, they would have had to apply for an "entertainment license." In Chicago, they used second-hand furniture. But in Boston, they would have had to buy it new or have the Boston Fire Department chemist test every chair to prove that it wasn't flammable.

Republicans or Independents dreaming of a 2016 presidential candidacy by the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, would be well advised first to have a look at libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's latest column. It's about J.P. Morgan Chase, but it gets into some past Christie adventures with deferred prosecution agreements (DPA):

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, claims that "everybody" wants to pay more to the federal government in taxes. Via RealClearPolitics:

the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The rich know that. The rich are willing to pay more. They're not the ones out here saying, 'please don't tax me.' The only people who feel there shouldn't be more coming in to the federal government from rich people are the Republicans in the Congress. Everybody else, including rich people, are willing to pay more. They want to pay more.

It's the sort of thing that makes you ask what planet these guys are on.

Sunday's New York Times carries a nice review of JFK, Conservative: "wonderfully mischievous... He has a point....Stoll's lively disputation offers a distinctive contribution to the debate."

Arnold Kling has some thoughts about why the ObamaCare Web site is in trouble.

"Americans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau. ...There were 108,592,000 people in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2011 who were recipients of one or more means-tested government benefit programs, the Census Bureau said in data released this week. Meanwhile, according to the Census Bureau, there were 101,716,000 people who worked full-time year round in 2011. That included both private-sector and government workers." CNSNews has the story.

From a New York Times column explaining why it has taken so long for the Bridge Cafe, a Lower Manhattan restaurant, to reopen after Hurricane Sandy:

Mr. Weprin confessed that part of the delay in reopening was because of his own obstinacy about getting building permits. He refused at first to hire an expediter, a person to climb the chutes and ladders at the Department of Buildings. "I called, she said $8,000, I went berserk," he said. He tried to do it himself but found himself nowhere after a month. The expediter cut a deal with him to do it for $1,200. Work is now under way.

I guess one way to interpret this is as Mr. Weprin's "obstinacy," but another way to look at it is as New York City's inability, even after nearly 12 years of Mayor Bloomberg's supposedly tech-savvy and incorruptible administration, to make it possible for a restaurant owner to repair his own flood-damaged restaurant without spending thousands of dollars on an "expediter" to navigate the city bureaucracy. It's outrageous.

The New York Times has a useful article about how airlines are using winglets — upswept ends of the wings of planes — to save money on fuel.

A Massachusetts Ballot initiative that would impose a civil penalty of 100% on all hospital earnings above an 8% profit margin (or surplus, in the case of nonprofits) is the subject of my column this week, which also discusses the ObamaCare rollout. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

"Abe Invokes Thatcherism as Reform Push Raises Disparity Risk" is the headline over an alarmist Bloomberg News article that is a classic of the genre. It speaks of "the danger that Abenomics will impose social strains on an economy where the income gap between the richest 10 percent and the poorest is a less than a third that in the U.S."

The article goes on, "Deepening disparities would mar a society that's prided itself on homogeneity."

The writer of this article, Keiko Ujikane, and the editor who moved it, Paul Panckhurst, sound like Bill de Blasio. They should both be assigned to read the defense of inequality in New York that was issued the other day by Mayor Bloomberg's press secretary, Mark LaVorgna.

I don't know where Bloomberg and New York Times journalists contract this anxiety about income inequality, but at a certain point it starts to get in the way of straightforward journalism.

The Washington Free Beacon reports, under the headline "JFK Museum Updates Exhibit Following Complaints by Conservative Author":

The John F. Kennedy museum in Dallas told the Washington Free Beacon that it is planning to "completely update and revise" its permanent exhibit after a historian accused it of falsely depicting the 35th president as a big-government liberal.

And in Sunday's Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby devotes his column, under the headline "Would Democrats embrace a JFK Today?" to my new book.

Glenn Beck has a report on a Yale Law School professor, Dan Kahn, who found a strong correlation between science comprehension and self-identified Tea Party membership:

In his analysis, Kahn openly admits he was surprised by the data:

President Obama, in his "Remarks by the President on the Reopening of the Government," said:

now that the government is reopened, and this threat to our economy is removed, all of us need to stop focusing on the lobbyists and the bloggers and the talking heads on radio and the professional activists who profit from conflict, and focus on what the majority of Americans sent us here to do, and that's grow this economy; create good jobs; strengthen the middle class; educate our kids; lay the foundation for broad-based prosperity and get our fiscal house in order for the long haul. That's why we're here. That should be our focus.

The October issue of the American Spectator features an excerpt of my new book JFK, Conservative.