Former Bush administration economic policy official Keith Hennessey offers a scathing annotated version of President Obama's remarks yesterday about the sequester. Mr. Hennessey writes:

Here's the President's position, as best I can infer:

How to fix Medicare and Social Security without raising taxes or cutting benefits is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Newsmax (here), Reason (here), and the New York Sun (here).

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about golfer Phil Mickelson, California state income taxes, and the way that the "exit right" serves as a check on state power":

The golfer Phil Mickelson, who often has his name in the sports pages for his athletic feats, has recently grabbed the headlines for an unconventional reason—he has politely protested California's new maximum tax rate of 13.3 percent. For Mickelson, who pulls down $45 million per year, that tax generates about $6 million in added revenues for a cash-hungry California; he can then deduct 40 percent of that $6 million in California taxes from his federal income tax. That tax two-step leaves him about $3.6 million short. In exchange, he gets little if anything from California in return.

NPR has a story about an author who set out to write a mournful elegy to polar bears endangered by global warming, but found out instead that "there are far more polar bears alive today than there were 40 years ago." There are so many of them that they are starting to bother the human population in Canada, the way rats, or squirrels, or pigeons do in New York City.

The latest news in the story of the fall of the fiat dollar is a press release from, of all places, the online retailer and Web service provider Amazon.com. Headlined, "Introducing Amazon Coins," it announces "a new virtual currency." According to the release, "When Amazon Coins launches in the U.S. this May, Amazon will give customers tens of millions of dollars' worth of free Amazon Coins to spend on developers' apps on Kindle Fire in the Amazon Appstore. Amazon will also make it quick and easy for customers to buy additional Amazon Coins using their Amazon accounts."

Matthew Yglesias of Slate has an article about all the bureaucratic hassles he had to go through to rent out an apartment he owns in Washington, D.C.:

The Cato Institute's Daniel Mitchell has a column pondering recommended destinations for flight if America goes down the tubes. After considering the Cayman Islands, Estonia, Switzerland, and Chile, Mr. Mitchell comes out for Australia.

There are nearly 2.5 million disabled-driver placards in California – one for every 10 drivers in the state, CBS News reports. Link via Amy Alkon.

The article doesn't get into how many of these drivers are drawing government disability benefits, but it's probably considerable.

Former Bush administration official Keith Hennessey has a characteristically smart and well-done post about the downside of government infrastructure investment, and about the flaws in some of the arguments that the Obama administration makes in favor of it:

If you advocate raising capital taxes (on capital gains and dividends, for instance, as Senate Democrats appear poised to do) at the same time you argue for increased government capital spending, you're shifting capital investment from the private sector to the public sector. That will slow long-run economic growth rather than increase it.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the idea of the U.S. Justice Department intervening in a U.S. court to try to prevent Belgium-based Anheuser-Busch InBev NV from buying Mexico-based Grupo Modelo seems like an overreach. A Belgian company wants to buy a Mexican one and the Obama Justice Department wants to stop it? I guess the claim is that American customers will be hurt by higher beer prices, but they can always grab a Sam Adams or a Narragansett or step up to a Saranac or some other beer that isn't owned by InBev. The Wall Street Journal notes the revolving door effect, which is that InBev and Modelo are hiring lots of former Department of Justice antitrust lawyers to try to get their deal approved.

Don't tell Eduardo Porter, but Governor Cuomo's proposed budget opens the door to for-profit hospital ownership in the state of New York. A client alert from the law firm EpsteinBeckerGreen, which has an active health care practice, has details. The pilot program backed by Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, would allow two for-profit-owned hospitals, one in Brooklyn, and one elsewhere in the state.

The Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell, makes the mistake of granting an interview to Yahoo! News, which, rather than reporting on what he said in the interview, disagrees with it, and more or less tells readers that they should disagree, too:

McConnell claimed Wednesday that the president's plan to use the government to help boost the economy was a failure and that the economy has been "tepid for four straight years."

"Most of what he's done hasn't worked," McConnell said.

That claim conflicts with data showing that under Obama the economy has added jobs and corporate profits have grown, and with other positive factors that show an economy in a slow but gradual recovery despite a slight contraction in the gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2012.

President Obama will let his White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness go out of existence this week, the Associated Press reports. It was a bad idea to begin with. The AP says the president has not met with the group since February 2012. The council's chairman, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, will find another way to spend his extra time.

The vice president for policy research at the Manhattan Institute, Howard Husock, writes in National Affairs, in an article headlined, "The Dangers of Quasi-Capitalism": "business and philanthropy are essentially distinct. Confusing and confounding their goals risks undermining the efficacy of both."

That Conscious Capitalism book by Whole Foods cofounder John Mackey that I wrote about the other day takes a different approach: "In many ways, conscious nonprofits and conscious businesses are quite similar; they are based on voluntary, noncoercive exchanges; have higher purposes; serve all their stakeholders; and have conscious leadership. Conscious businesses and conscious nonprofits both create value for their stakeholders. The wall separating them needs to be taken down."

A politics editor and reporter at the Boston Globe, Glen Johnson, is leaving the paper to go work for the new secretary of state, John Kerry.