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It was nearly three years ago — November 2009 — that this site mentioned the "Stopping Trained in America Ph.D.s from Leaving the Economy Act," or the "Staple Act," which would effectively staple a green card to the diploma of foreigners who earn their doctoral degrees in America. It was mentioned here again in August 2011 as No. 11 of the 27 Ideas For Jobs and Growth, again in September of 2011 as Cost-Free-Job-Creating-Idea No. 6. Gordon Crovitz wrote a wonderful column about the idea that ran in the Wall Street Journal on October 31, 2011 after Steve Jobs discussed it with President Obama and Walter Isaacson reported that it struck Jobs as an example of political paralysis. Wrote Mr. Crovitz:

For a preview of the upcoming presidential debate, you could do worse than taking a look at the video or transcript of the hourlong debate that happened September 20 between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown, the candidates for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts.

Some of the issues were particular to the Massachusetts race, with Senator Brown calling on Professor Warren — he called her Professor Warren throughout the debate — to release her Harvard personnel records to demonstrate what role, if any, her claimed American Indian status played in her hiring. Senator Brown also faulted Professor Warren for personally contributing to the high cost of college by earning nearly $300,000 a year, plus zero interest loans, to teach one class. And he faulted her for taking $250,000 from the Travelers insurance company to consult on denying claims for asbestos poisoning.

But other themes in the debate are likely to be heard in the session between President Obama and Mitt Romney.

Since Mayor Bloomberg is so determined to prevent privately owned New York businesses from selling sugary drinks in sizes larger than 16 ounces, you would think he might take action to prevent the actual New York City government agencies he controls from doing the same. Yet in the lobby of the central Brooklyn Public Library today, I encountered not one but two Snapple vending machines offering for sale non-diet beverages in 20-ounce bottles. All too often this is how government regulation works — the government tries to impose rules on the private sector, complete with penalties for failing to comply. But the government itself doesn't follow the rules it tries to make the private sector obey.

From a Bloomberg Businessweek article about Robert Rubin, President Clinton's former Treasury Secretary:

In October 2007, as Citigroup was imploding, Rubin went to South Beach to visit his father, who died a year later at 101. In line at an upscale grocery, he met Iris Mack. One of the first African American women to get a Harvard Ph.D. in applied mathematics, Mack also worked at Enron and the Harvard Management Co. Over the next 14 months, Rubin pursued her romantically. They would meet, according to Mack, in his Ritz-Carlton Hotel suite, where he would stay after flying in on the Citigroup corporate jet. "It's one of the perks," Mack says Rubin told her.

This is not news, but it does call into question how hard Rubin was working for his $15 million annual salary. Mack, who is single and 46, wrote about her relationship with Rubin in an April 2010 Huffington Post article. She decided to go public after watching Rubin testify before the FCIC. ...

Seven of the country's ten richest counties are in the Washington, D.C. area, the Washington Post reports, based on a new census survey. Maryland has the highest median household income of any state, about $70,000, surpassing New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, or California. The Post says, "In 2007, before the recession began, five counties in suburban Washington made it into the top 10. By 2010, there were six. The seven in the latest ranking is an all-time high."

That's what happens when you have a vast expansion of the federal government.

Mitt Romney has a short op-ed in USA Today expanding on his surreptitiously videotaped remarks about the "47 percent." From the op-ed: "Under President Obama, we have a stagnant economy that fosters government dependency. My policies will create a growing economy that fosters upward mobility."

Fourteen Internet companies — Amazon.com, AOL, eBay, Expedia, Facebook, Google, IAC, LinkedIn, Monster Worldwide, Rackspace, salesforce.com, TripAdvisor, Yahoo!, and Zynga — have formed a new trade association in Washington, the Internet Association, led by Michael Beckerman, who until earlier this year was deputy staff director of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Link via Reuters.

The first debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney is scheduled for Wednesday, October 3, at the University of Denver in Colorado. In my column this week, I suggest questions for both candidates. Please check the column out at Reason (here) and the New York Sun (here), and if you have your own ideas for debate questions, please write them in the comments here at this site.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, last seen calling Goldman Sachs "blood-sucking," is back with more anti-Semitic stereotypes in her latest column, which runs under the headline "Neocons Slither Back."

"Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor," Ms. Dowd writes. The display type in the newspaper reads: "Look who's pulling the strings of Marionette Mitt and Puppet Paul."

The column goes on, "If President Romney acceded to Netanyahu's outrageous demand for clear red lines on Iran, this global conflagration would be a tiny foretaste of the conflagration to come."

What will happen in the next two weeks is unpredictable, at least by me, but on the basis of the past two days, it sure is looking like a nice year for the old Wall Street adage sell on Rosh Hashana, buy on Yom Kippur.

Posting will be sparser than usual here Monday and Tuesday because of the Jewish holiday.

President Obama's operation is so eager to create an air of inevitability that it's already leaking names for a second term. Politico's Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei have details. They report that Roger Altman is "actively lobbying for Treasury," that "Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer and chief of staff at Treasury under Bill Clinton, might be asked to be Treasury Secretary or, more likely, to succeed Gene Sperling as director of the National Economic Council" and that "Dan Doctoroff, president and CEO of Bloomberg L.P., would be another possible ambassador to business."

Think of this the next time you see Britain's National Health Service celebrated in an Olympic opening ceremony: A British hospital placed a "do not resuscitate" order on a patient, listing the reasons as "Down's syndrome" and "learning difficulties," BBC reports.

I hope that sort of thing could not happen here. Maybe it could. But it's chilling to hear about, wherever it happens.

The number of food stamp recipients in New York has grown to 3.1 million from 1.8 million over the last five years.

You'd think the state would be looking to help people get off food stamps. Instead, it's spending millions of dollars on "outreach" aimed at enrolling even more beneficiaries into the program. Among the non-profits receiving grants for food stamp "outreach" are the United Way of New York City, which got $4.5 million, Year Up, Inc., which got $1.5 million, and Project Hospitality, Inc., which got $1.5 million.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has subpoenaed firms represented at Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's meeting with money managers at which he disclosed to them his plans to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he was telling the public something else, the Wall Street Journal reports.

If the SEC can't get to the bottom of it, maybe the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District, the New York State attorney general's office, or the district attorney of New York County can. It doesn't get much more newsworthy than this: it goes right to the heart of how the financial crisis deepened and how government action, rather than stabilizing things, made it worse, creating a panic where there had been none because of the fear that the government would go around seizing private companies from the investors who owned them.

Two things need to be found out: