The Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog against press bias, invited me to be a guest judge to help determine the "worst quotes of the year" for its TimesWatch project that focuses on the New York Times. The results appear here.

Best wishes to all FutureOfCapitalism readers, community members, participants, subscribers, commenters, content co-creators, watchdogs, and friends for a healthy, happy, successful, prosperous, and free 2012.

Nils Stolpe deconstructs a Bloomberg Businessweek article on the Gloucester fish wars, concluding that the author "wasn't even close."

"Our infrastructure used to be the best, but our lead has slipped. South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do. Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads and railways than we do. China is building faster trains and newer airports." — President Obama, State of the Union Address, January 25, 2011.

"SHANGHAI—Flawed equipment and procedures as well as corruption were the main culprits in a Chinese bullet-train collision this year, the government said, conceding that its rail-network expansion has gone too fast." —"China Blasts High-Speed Rail System," news article, Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2011.

Amity Shlaes has a new column up at Bloomberg View: "The bottom half of all earners pay less than 5 percent of the income tax....When marginal tax rates approach 50 percent, as they do now, many of the wealthy are likely to decamp to jurisdictions outside the U.S., where taxes are lower. And they'll probably bring their companies with them."

Thomas Sowell has a column endorsing Newt Gingrich in the Republican primaries: "Why not vote for the candidate who has shown the best track record of accomplishments, both in office and in the debates? That is Newt Gingrich. With all his shortcomings, his record shows that he knows how to get the job done in Washington."

A lot of people got emails today saying their New York Times subscriptions had been canceled, even if they had never purchased a subscription or had one that they had not canceled. Jim Romenesko has some details here.

Update: A communications director for the New York Times Company, Danielle Roades Ha, has sent this statement:

An email was sent earlier today from The New York Times in error. This email should have been sent to a very small number of subscribers, but instead was sent to a vast distribution list made up of people who had previously provided their email address to The New York Times. We regret this error and we regret our earlier communication noting that this email was SPAM.

It seems like maybe it was spam, just spam sent by the New York Times Company rather than some unauthorized imposter or outsider who somehow got hold of the Times list.

It's now December 28, nine days after the initial Missouri health alert that triggered the December 22 Mead Johnson press release on the safety of its infant formula, and there's no official word from the FDA on whether the stuff is safe (though the company says "with confidence" that it is).

Meanwhile, the FDA spends a lot of resources on non-safety related issues, such as "efficacy," or whether medicine actually heals diseases. Perhaps the Enfamil episode will give a boost to efforts, such as the one by former Intel CEO Andrew Grove, to reform the FDA so that it focuses on safety alone rather than efficacy.

The Social Security Disability Insurance system, the topic of an item here yesterday morning, is a front-page news article in this morning's Wall Street Journal under the headline "Jobless Tap Disability Fund."

A former congressman from Oklahoma, Ernest Istook, and I were on the America's Morning News radio show this morning discussing, among other things, the FutureOfCapitalism item about how newly hired federal employees are starting out at higher pay than in the past. Mr. Istook made the point that while President Obama is going around claiming he froze federal pay for two years, that's deceptive, because as the Heritage Foundation has pointed out, "In fact, under the measure the president dubbed a 'freeze,' the Federal Times estimated that 1.1 million federal employees will receive pay bumps totaling more than $2.5 billion in additional salary through the standard 'step increases' federal pay system."

I told Mr. Istook that this kind of blatantly misleading statement by the president is the sort of thing that breeds mistrust in government and cynicism.

An online petition at SaveOurTimes.com, signed by at least 284 New York Times staff members, complains about outgoing Times Company CEO Janet Robinson's "very generous severance and retirement package," along with the company's demands for concessions in talks with its union:

We have worked long and hard for this company and have given up pay to keep it solvent. Some of us have risked our lives for it. You have eloquently recognized and paid moving tribute to our work and devotion. The deep disconnect between those words and the demands of your negotiators have given rise to a sense of betrayal.

It's worth clicking through to see the list of reporters who signed the petition. From where I sit, rather than feeling betrayed, they should feel lucky they still have jobs, but on the other hand, that Janet Robinson exit package was really something, and I can understand how those working at the Times would feel frustrated at their company's poor performance, even in an overall poor climate for newspapers.

Richard Fernandez has a gloomy piece on the decline of Europe, linking the economic problems to closing churches and low birth rates. It quotes a dispatch from Der Spiegel about a liquidator who specializes in selling pews and other surplus items from shuttered churches: "in the Netherlands, Christianity's retreat from society has been particularly drastic. The Protestant Church alone loses some 60,000 members each year. At this rate, it will cease to exist there by 2050, church officials say."

George Mason University professor Donald Boudreaux, writing in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

If the current American model for supplying K-12 education is desirable, why do we not also supply college and post-graduate education in the same way? That is, why not fund state colleges with tax dollars, charge zero tuition and assign each post-secondary student to that college in his or her geographic district? Going to a public college outside of the district would be prohibited. Does anyone believe that implementing this model of supplying college education would improve post-secondary education?

From David Brooks's column today in the New York Times:

The United States spends far more on education than any other nation, with paltry results. It spends far more on health care, again, with paltry results. It spends so much on poverty programs that if we just took that money and handed poor people checks, we would virtually eliminate poverty overnight. In the progressive era, the task was to build programs; today the task is to reform existing ones.

Newly hired federal employees are starting out at higher pay than in the past, USA Today reports:

A 20- to 24-year-old auto mechanic started at an average of $46,427 this year, up from $36,750 five years ago. The government hires about 400 full-time auto mechanics a year.

A 30- to 34-year-old lawyer started at an average of $101,045 this year, up from $79,177 five years ago. The government hires about 2,500 lawyers a year. And a mechanical engineer, age 25 to 29, started at $63,675, up from $51,746 in 2006. The government hires about 600 mechanical engineers a year.

Also, "Under the Obama administration, layoffs from reorganizations have dropped by two-thirds to fewer than 300 a year in the 2.1 million person workforce. Workers are 13 times more likely to die of natural causes than get laid off from the federal government," and "The portion of federal workers earning $100,000 or more grew from 12% in 2006 to 22% in 2011."