Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's latest column is about the implementation of what he calls "the ObamaCare quagmire."

My column this week is about Fareed Zakaria, who was an honorary degree recipient and the main speaker at Harvard's 2012 commencement and who recently apologized for failing to attribute material from the New Yorker that ended up in his own Time magazine column. Please check out the column at Reason here.

You can pretty much tell where people come out politically by what they think of McDonald's. Mitt Romney talks with apparent pride on the campaign trail about how his dad had a card that entitled him to free McDonald's for life. Michelle Obama, on the other hand, scolds Olympic hero Gabby Douglas for celebrating her gold medal with an Egg McMuffin.

Back when he was running for president Bill Clinton was a big McDonald's customer.

The New York Daily News ran my article about immigration policy and the Olympics. Please check it out here.

The New York Times news article on Las Vegas Sands, the company led by Sheldon Adelson, and its dealings in China carries the names of the following Times reporters and "researchers":

• Michael Luo
• Neil Gough
• Edward Wong
• Keith Bradsher
• Louise Story
• Mia Li
• Sue-Lin Wong
• Xu Yan
• Kitty Bennett

Which is nine of them.

The Times article concedes that the "broad outlines" of the story were carried last week by the Wall Street Journal. The Journal's article carries the names of

• Alexandra Berzon
• Kate O'Keeffe
• Yang Jie
• Tamara Audi
• Justin Scheck
• Kersten Zhang
• Jeremy Page
• James V. Grimaldi

Which is eight journalists.

New York magazine has an interview with JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon:

Everyone is afraid of retaliation and retribution. We recently had an event with a hundred small bankers here, and 85 percent of them said they can't challenge the regulation because of the potential retribution. That's a terrible thing. Okay? This is not the Soviet Union. This is the United States of America...

Good for him for saying so.

From a Wall Street Journal editorial:

Our advice is that Mr. Romney go on offense on Medicare. He could hit Mr. Obama with ads in Florida and elsewhere for his $716 billion in Medicare cuts...

No sooner had the advice been given than it was taken. From a Yahoo! News account of the joint Romney-Ryan interview with "60 Minutes" that aired Sunday night:

"There's only one president that I know of in history that robbed Medicare," Romney said. "Seven-hundred-sixteen billion dollars to pay for a new risky program of his own that we call Obamacare."

This may be good politics (though I wouldn't even necessarily assume that), but it's terrible for the country.

Here are Medicare annual spending totals from President George W. Bush's final year and from President Obama's first three complete years, according to the White House office of management and budget:

A review in the New York Times of the movie 2016: Obama's America observes, "Mr. D'Souza revives figures tied to Mr. Obama by conservative critics in the last election, including the Rev. Jeremiah Wright...." Yeah, "conservative" critics like Hillary Clinton and Times reporter Jodi Kantor and the Times editors who assigned and ran news coverage of the issue.

It's as though the Times movie reviewer or his editors don't actually believe it possible that anyone who isn't a conservative would ever criticize Obama, or question his past associations.

Some early thoughts on Mitt Romney's decision to choose Paul Ryan as his running mate:

A Romney-Ryan ticket was one of the six choices I listed on the New Year's pool back in December of 2011.

Two more data points have surfaced in the emerging story (covered earlier here, here, and here) of how health care costs are slowing, not skyrocketing, and for reasons that have little or nothing to do with Obamacare.

First, the Altarum Institute's Center for Sustainable Health Care Spending has released its August 2012 spending and price briefs, reporting, "Health care prices in June 2012 were up 1.9 percent from June 2011, ticking down a tenth from May. On a 12-month moving average basis, price growth is lower now than at any time since January 1999." By Altarum's assessment, health spending over the 12 months ended in June 2012 actually grew at nine-tenths of a percentage point less than overall GDP did.

The Obama campaign is not backing away from the "you didn't build that" message, if Mike Allen's account of plans for the Democratic convention is accurate. He writes:

Each night of the convention will include a star turn for what planners call "real people" – an auto worker whose job was saved, a student who benefited from college loans and an entrepreneur fueled by federal research-and-development funds.

This idea that government, rather than individuals, are responsible for success is not some gaffe or out-of-context remark; it's the Obama campaign's core message and ideology. Charles Krauthammer has a new column that ties this ideology to Obama's failures:

Romney has a point on welfare, Mickey Kaus writes.

The state of Massachusetts has spent more than $275,000 mailing voter registration forms to welfare recipients in advance of the Scott Brown-Elizabeth Warren Senate election, the Boston Herald reports.

A large group of trade associations and business groups — including the American Bakers Association, American Hotel and Lodging Association, National Association of Convenience Stores, National Automobile Dealers Association, National Funeral Directors Association, National Restaurant Association, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — have banded together into the Stop the Hit Coalition, working to repeal the health insurance tax ("HIT") that is part of ObamaCare. They are promoting this YouTube video starring Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who is now the president of the American Action Forum, who says the $80 billion tax will cause people to lose their insurance, their doctor, and their money.

A Chinese company, Wanxiang Group Corp., will buy an American electric-car-battery firm, A123 systems, which has won $249 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy. The Wall Street Journal reports:

A spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee said of the deal: "It is unfortunate Obama borrowed from the Chinese to give taxpayer money to prop up green energy companies that the Chinese are now buying."