"The Most Influential Evangelist You've Never Heard of" is the headline NPR chooses to put on its story about conservative historian David Barton.

The headline discloses some interesting assumptions that NPR makes about its own readership. First, it assumes that NPR Web site viewers must not read the New York Times, which ran a front-page news article about Mr. Barton on May 4, 2011. People who read the front page of the New York Times would have heard of David Barton.

Second, the NPR Web site home page subheadline is that "David Barton's view of U.S. history is popular with conservative churches, universities and the GOP." If this guy is "popular," someone must have heard of him, no? He certainly sells a lot of books. I've heard of him. Maybe NPR thinks its listeners don't go to conservative churches or universities and aren't Republicans, but that they also don't read the New York Times?

The National Press Club has posted video of its journalism awards dinner, which is illuminating in its own way about the self-congratulatory culture of journalism. One interesting moment came when Bloomberg News got an award for its coverage of campaign finance. Accepting the award, a Bloomberg reporter, Jonathan Salant, said, "I believe that the First Amendment gives us the power and the responsibility to watch over those in power." He went on:

In this case, we chronicled how millions of dollars in secret money was spent, primarily to help elect Republican lawmakers. In some cases we found not only were the sources of the money hidden but so too were the expenditures. We're seeing this play out again in 2012, with the same groups, and some new ones, spending millions of dollars without telling the public who is funding the ads they are seeing.

The same First Amendment that Mr. Salant hails also protects the campaign spending he seems so disturbed by. That went unmentioned in his remarks.

SmartMoney has an article on how the government is docking Social Security checks to recover unpaid student loan debt:

From January through August 6, the government reduced the size of roughly 115,000 retirees' Social Security checks on those grounds. That's nearly double the pace of the department's enforcement in 2011; it's up from around 60,000 cases in all of 2007 and just 6 cases in 2000....

Many of these retirees aren't even in hock for their own educations. Consumer advocates say that in the majority of the cases they've seen, the borrowers went into debt later in life to help defray education costs for their children or other dependents.

Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has a Bloomberg View column observing that it is "somewhat bizarre" that the government is devoting choice Manhattan real estate to use as parking lots for residents of public housing projects, who pay no more than $45 a month for spots. It can cost that much to park for a day in a private lot in Manhattan.

Professor Glaeser gets a bit squishy when it comes to fixing the problem: "taking this benefit away from the most vulnerable city residents would seem to single them out and amount to expropriation.... Let them give their parking spaces back to the city in exchange for cash. The city can rent the space at full market rates to whoever will pay, and give the net proceeds back to the resident. The resident who takes the deal will be better off. ... When public-housing parking spaces fall empty, they should be rented at market rates, and the earnings should be shared among the projects' residents or spent on common amenities."

Contrary to what President Obama told Congress when he was trying to get his health care law passed, spending on health care has actually been moderating, not skyrocketing. That's the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Newsmax (here), or Reason (here).

Meanwhile, Scott Brown's Senate campaign issued a press release quoting last week's column, the one about Elizabeth Warren's China ad.

What an extraordinary admission comes toward the end of today's New York Times editorial:

higher taxes for top earners is necessary for the nation to begin to raise the revenue it needs. And until the rich pay more, there will never be a national consensus for tax increases on middle-income Americans, which will eventually be needed to further curb long-term deficits.

Atul Gawande has an article in the New Yorker about what medicine can learn from the Cheesecake Factory restaurant chain. Dr. Gawande doesn't quite make it explicit, but there's passage that does a wonderful job of explaining how the profit motive in capitalism reinforces the virtue of thrift:

They watched for waste—wasted food, wasted time, wasted effort. The formula was Business 101: Use the right amount of goods and labor to deliver what customers want and no more. Anything more is waste, and waste is lost profit.

Keith Koffler of the White House Dossier has an article reporting that "President Obama has not taken a serious question from the White House press corps in nearly seven weeks." When you get into it it turns out that the president did do an interview with Charlie Rose on July 12, for which CBS's White House producers probably helped craft some questions, and the president also did some local television interviews. What made me chuckle was a question that Mr. Koffler's article gives as an example of those that the president is not answering:

Q. Mr. President, can you tell us, if what the Colorado shooter did was entirely legal, how do you do more on this subject without any new laws?

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. I'm sure we'll have more opportunity to talk about this.

Q. This afternoon is fine. I'm available.

THE PRESIDENT: Thanks. I'll ask Jay for your number. (Laughter.)

"Criticism Grows as Check-Cashing Stores Expand in Poorer Areas" is the headline on a New York Times article that is one of those damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you don't treatments. When the financial institutions avoid the poor areas, they're accused of "redlining," or discrimination, as in the Bill Dedman-Bill Kovach series that won the Pulitzer Prize for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1989. When they open up shop in the poor areas, they come in for, as the Times article puts it, "renewed criticism from advocates for poor residents and from bank officials, who say the check-cashing industry takes advantage of those who have no other options."

Particularly rich is the criticism of the check-cashing company, RiteCheck, from Amalgamated Bank:

Peter Ferrara gets pretty heated toward the end of this column — "The Obama campaign is trailblazing new realms of dishonesty in the history of American politics, bringing to America for the first time Soviet-style propaganda" — but even readers who find that to be a bit much may find some interesting points along the way, among them:

In Monday's Wall Street Journal, Edward Lazear, former Bush chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, notes, "A graph titled 'Private Sector Job Creation' on the Obama-Biden campaign website... announces proudly that 4.4 million private sector jobs have been created over the past 28 months." But that factoid is meaningless out of any context, more like a pediatrician boasting to you that under his care your 16-year-old son has grown to 4 feet 4 inches. At the same point during the Reagan recovery, the economy had created 9.5 million new jobs.

Something to consider in reacting to today's jobs report for July.

David Brooks and Virginia Postrel both have columns on President Obama's "You didn't build that" comment, which Peggy Noonan calls "the most famous words he has said in his presidency."

Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, writes about school vouchers in his Bloomberg View column:

There is a deep and indefensible hypocrisy in the Democratic Party's stony opposition to programs that would allow poor parents to make educational choices similar to those often exercised by the party's leaders and contributors -- especially given the party's claims to believe in the importance of undoing inequality. Indeed, the best argument for vouchers isn't results but equality, that is, helping the poor to afford what the well- off can buy. After all, parents of means are free to choose private schools that others would avoid.

Maybe Mayor Bloomberg will read the column his company paid Professor Carter to write and come out in favor of school vouchers in New York City, where he controls the schools. It strikes me as a long shot, but you never know.

A lot of businesses operate with low margins in some areas but higher ones in others. Movie theaters, for example, make a lot of money selling high-priced popcorn and soda. And airlines seem to have cut base ticket prices low, but are now charging money for food and in some cases in-flight wireless Internet service or movies. Leave it to our government-owned passenger railroad, Amtrak, to figure out a way to lose money while selling food to a captive audience. USA Today reports:

Amtrak loses millions on its food and beverage service, and a congressional committee wants to know why.

The company's food and beverage cars have lost $833.8 million over the last decade, including $84.5 million in 2011, according to testimony at a congressional hearing Thursday.

"If Romney were to show up in London and say that in President Obama's ideal Olympics, the gold medal winners would be taxed at higher rates so that some of the gold in their medals could be redistributed to non-medal winners...the former Massachusetts governor would probably be criticized for politicizing the summer games, a sin second only to commercializing them." — Ira Stoll column, July 24, 2012

"From a friend watching the Olympics: 'How about that Michael Phelps? But let's remember he didn't win all those medals, someone else did. After all, he and I swam in public pools, built by state employees using tax dollars. He got training from the USOC, and ate food grown by the Department of Agriculture. He should play fair and share his medals with people like me, who can barely keep my head above water, let alone swim.' — Peggy Noonan column , Wall Street Journal, August 2, 2012.

President Obama's director of management and budget, Peter Orszag, now vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup, has emailed a reply to the earlier post here about his admission that the growth in health care costs is slowing because of market forces, technological innovation, and the economy rather than because of the ObamaCare law that he helped sell to Congress and the public as a bend-the-curve measure. He wrote:

Mr Stoll,

I was shown a copy of your article on my "admission," which was nothing of the sort at all. Both the perceived shift away from fee-for-service and toward bundling and other payment schemes, and the development of the IT backbone crucial to benchmarking and decision support were encouraged by recent policy changes (the ACA and the stimulus bill respectively), as I have written repeatedly in the past. In other words, two of the three structural changes driving recent deceleration were directly influenced by legislation enacted since 2009. Your article is simply wrong.

Regards,

Peter