The New York State Trial Lawyers Association is opposing a bill in Albany that would grant bowling alleys limited immunity from slip-and-fall lawsuits if they post signs warning customers not to wear their bowling shoes outside. The Albany Times Union reports:

those in the bowling business say slip-and-fall lawsuits roll in with regularity.

And they've become more common since New York's indoor smoking ban took effect in 2003. These days, those seeking a smoke go outside. But if it's rainy or snowy, leather-soled bowling shoes can become wet and slippery, thus the increased risk of injury.

Who knew the smoking ban would be such a health hazard?

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein writes about the IRS scandal:

The dismal performance of the IRS is but a symptom of a much larger disease which has taken root in the charters of many of the major administrative agencies in the United States today: the permit power. Private individuals are not allowed to engage in certain activities or to claim certain benefits without the approval of some major government agency. The standards for approval are nebulous at best, which makes it hard for any outside reviewer to overturn the agency's decision on a particular application.

The scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service's extra scrutiny and delays in approving the applications of Tea Party and other groups for tax-exempt status is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here) and Newsmax (here).

The New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer about the after-effects of the PBS "Park Avenue" documentary I wrote about back in November. The New Yorker article expresses concern that there will be a "chilling effect" or "censorship" of PBS's coverage of Koch Industries or of David Koch.

This is almost comical, given the surfeit of coverage of Koch, the Koch brothers, and their political and philanthropic activities. One can hardly pick up the New York Times or the New Yorker or the Nation or click on the Huffington Post without enduring some long geschrei about the Koch brothers. If there has been a chilling effect or censorship, it's difficult to detect.

An essay by the former governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, about focusing the conservative movement on growth and opportunity is now up online:

We have, for too long, been the party of "slow down." Today, we must be the party of "hurry up."

We must stand for radical reform and experimentation.

NPR takes an extended, skeptical, and very well done look at the disability benefits system:

The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined….

In Hale County, Alabama, nearly 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability. On the day government checks come in every month, banks stay open late, Main Street fills up with cars, and anybody looking to unload an old TV or armchair has a yard sale.

Sonny Ryan, a retired judge in town, didn't hear disability cases in his courtroom. But the subject came up often. He described one exchange he had with a man who was on disability but looked healthy.

"Just out of curiosity, what is your disability?" the judge asked from the bench.
"I have high blood pressure," the man said.
"So do I," the judge said. "What else?"
"I have diabetes."
"So do I."…

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about the difficulties in implementing ObamaCare. He writes:

In this sorry state of the world, the only short-term mechanism that could stop the general blood-letting is a much-needed reversal that pushes back all the key dates for running the plan. The respite in question should not be used only to iron out the difficulties in securing the needed coverage. It should be used to update the information base to decide whether the ACA, on which billions have already been squandered, is so unsustainable that it should be scrapped in its entirety.

The commencement speech members of the Class of 2013 probably won't hear, but that I wish had been given when I graduated, is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason here and at Newsmax here.

The chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, gave the Irving Kristol Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute May 8. AEI has now posted Mr. Ryan's remarks as prepared for delivery, and they are worth a look for those interested in the question of the post-2012 direction of the Republican Party or the conservative movement. The talk is titled "Conservatism and Community."

An economist at Ohio State University, Richard Vedder, has an article up at Bloomberg View about how to tell if a college president is overpaid.

The New York Times has some numbers, including the $984,647 that the president of Ball State University earned.

Sometimes what drives legislation in Washington is not partisanship or principle but just constituent service.

An example appears to be the Citrus Disease Research and Development Trust Fund Act of 2013. The New York Times has a glancing mention of it in an above-the-fold front-page news article today headlined "Citrus Disease With No Cure is Ravaging Florida's Groves."

The Senate bill is introduced by Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, and co-sponsored by Senators Boxer and Feinstein, Democrats of California. The House bill is sponsored by Rep. Vern Buchanan, a Republican, and co-sponsored by 21 Democrats and 19 Republicans — all from the citrus-growing states of Texas, California, Florida, and Arizona.

How's this for an Associated Press/Washington Post headline: "IRS apologizes for inappropriately targeting conservative political groups in 2012 election."

Well, at least they apologized. It will be interesting to see if they will reimburse the groups for the legal and accounting and other costs of complying with the inappropriate scrutiny. Somehow I doubt it.

Clive Crook's Bloomberg view column criticizing Paul Krugman, which we excerpted and linked earlier here, has elicited a ferocious response, including one from a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, Brad DeLong, who, as Mr. Crook summarizes the matter in a follow-up column, posted an item that "exemplifies the intemperance I'm addressing. He illustrates it with a picture of a clown. He also wants me fired. 'Bloomberg has some house-cleaning to do,' he says -- charming, and from a tenured academic, to boot."

Charming, indeed.

A New York Times dispatch on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual costume gala reports:

Don't take this as approval, but you can tell it's a wild party when people who normally sneak away to smoke in the bathrooms are now smoking openly inside the galleries, even though Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was there (or at least he had been earlier).

It will be interesting to see whether Mayor Bloomberg and his administration come down as hard on the Met as they would on a small business that showed similar disregard for the city's anti-tobacco regulations. If the Museum gets away with no consequences, it sure looks like a double standard.

From a New York Times article about the fall-off in recent performance by the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers:

Kleiner has held a series of status-report meetings with its outside investors this year, acknowledging that recent fund performance "wasn't great," one attendee said. "They really believed green tech was going to be the next big technology wave," this investor added.

I'm not a big fan of anonymous sources, but this line made me chuckle. The ranks of those who "really believed green tech was going to be the next big technology wave" included not only Kleiner Perkins but also President Obama and lots of other investors both private and governmental. There were plenty of journalists, too. That the Times can now admit in a front-of-the-business-section news article that this view was incorrect is a big deal.

That's not to say that no one made any money on this stuff, or to say that no one ever will. But it wasn't as easy or as sure a thing as it seemed at the time.