So much for rising income inequality. Jason DeParle reports in the New York Times:

The share of income received by the top 1 percent — that potent symbol of inequality — dropped to 17 percent in 2009 from 23 percent in 2007, according to federal tax data. Within the group, average income fell to $957,000 in 2009 from $1.4 million in 2007.

Someone should tell President Obama about this.

From a Bloomberg news article about art dealers having difficulty getting buyers to pay bills for Asian art:

The difficulties of dealing with Asian clients are summed up by an anonymous poem currently circulating in the trade:

The Chinese bid with verve and skill,

And hence rack up a mighty bill.

"The money's coming soon" they cry

But oh, my friend, they lie, they lie.

You'd think maybe a Bloomberg editor would want to think twice before circulating a nasty anonymous poem describing "the Chinese" — 1.3 billion of them — as a bunch of liars. Imagine if the poem were about some other nationality or minority group that it is less socially acceptable to slur. I'm not a big enforcer of political correctness, but this one is a little bit much even for me.

The New York Sun (which is run by my friend and former partner Seth Lipsky and which sometimes runs my weekly column) has a nifty editorial picking up on the objections in Wall Street Journal letters to the editor to American labor leader Andrew Stern's op-ed piece in the Journal touting the supposed superiority of the Chinese Communist economic model to the American one. It's an editorial worth reading if you don't want America to end up like Communist China. And it's even more newsworthy because of Mr. Stern's ties to both the current president of the United States and, more tenuously but nonetheless astonishingly, the Republican front-runner.

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Bloomberg News fans the flames of class resentments with an article on the differences between Bridgeport, Conn., which is poor, and Greenwich, Conn, which is rich. The article paraphrases "A. Fiona Pearson, who teaches sociology at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain," as saying, "Exacerbating the gap are the ranks of wealthy residents who have grown richer as the region became a hub for investment firms and hedge funds."

From the comments: "Nice. I pay $1500/month to Mayor Bloomberg for my Bloomberg machine. Last time I checked he's on the Forbes 100 list and worth in the Billions! I hope that his left leaning Bloomberg staff is soothing his conscience a bit."

"College Sports Need a Government Intervention" is the headline over a column by Albert Hunt, the executive editor for Washington at Bloomberg News. The column goes on to say, "It probably would be foolish for Congress to legislate. No one has devised a sensible policy initiative," which makes a reader wonder whether the headline writer read the column. On the other hand, adding the words "need a government intervention" to the column topic is usually a safe formula for writing the headlines on Albert Hunt columns and on much but certainly not all other Bloomberg material.

The Manhattan Institute's Nicole Gelinas, writing in the New York Post:

the bigger problem is that Wall Street grew too much — too large to serve the financial needs of the US or world economies. Like any business that outgrows its market, it must get smaller.

A smaller industry would be better for the city in the long run. Without finance dominating New York, people in other industries could afford to work here. The new jobs don't have to pay as much; a shrinking financial industry will drive down housing and other costs....

Paul Rahe has a piece up at Ricochet.com likening President Obama to a liberal mayor of New York, John Lindsay: "In effect, what Obama and his advisors plan to do is to abandon once and for all the old New Deal coalition and forge a new governing coalition resembling the one that John Lindsay put together in the city of New York – i.e., a coalition of upscale voters and minorities with some support from young people of the sort who were carried away by Lindsay's glamor."

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new column up at the Hoover Institution Web site about President Obama's speech in Osawatomie: "these statements reveal a breathtaking ignorance about the sources of national prosperity. .... The problem, therefore, with the president's speech is not that it is demagogic in tone. The problem is that it is intellectually incoherent. As a matter of high principle, the president announces his fealty to markets. As a matter of practical politics, he denigrates and undermines them at every step."

From the Hoover Institution Web site:

The Hoover Institution, including the library and archives, will be closed from Saturday, Dec. 17, 2011, through Monday, Jan. 2, 2012.
The development office will remain available throughout the holidays...

I was thinking of taking a two-week vacation here and just leaving the how to help page open, but there's just too much news happening.

The Web site memeburn.com has an interview with me that runs under the headline "Whistleblowing, transparency, and the future of journalism."

From an NPR news article: "NPR and the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a poll of people who had been unemployed or with an insufficient level of work for more than a year. The results document the financial, emotional and physical effects of long-term unemployment and underemployment.....the long-term unemployed and underemployed identify themselves as Democrat or Democrat-leaning by 2 to 1."

Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the New Yorker:

In this campaign, Gingrich's performances in televised debates have been widely deemed effective. But what has won him his most visceral cheers from the audiences in the halls—audiences shaped and coarsened by years of listening to talk radio and watching Fox News—is his sneering attacks on moderators, especially those representing the hated "liberal" media.

The only one allowed to sneer, apparently, is Mr. Hertzberg.

Actually, I shouldn't sneer at Mr. Hertzberg, because though we come from different ideological angles, we actually have a similar analysis. From my column this week, The Case for Newt, up here at the New York Sun and here at Reason.com:

With the Republican primary debate field narrowed to six by Herman Cain's decision to suspend his campaign and the exclusion of Jon Huntsman, the four candidates who are neither Newt Gingrich nor Mitt Romney ganged up on the two frontrunners in what was one of the most lively and intense debates so far.

Rep. Michele Bachmann lumped the two together as "Newt Romney," charging that the pair were for ObamaCare, illegal immigration, cap and trade emissions regulation, the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, and President Obama's payroll tax cut. Mr. Gingrich, she said, supported an individual mandate to buy health insurance for 20 years, longer than Barack Obama. And Governor Romney, she said, was the only governor to "put in place socialized medicine."

Mr. Gingrich replied, "a lot of what you say just isn't true, period." He said he opposed ObamaCare and cap-and-trade, and that his original support for an individual mandate had been as an alternative to Hillary Clinton's health plan.

Mr. Romney said he never favored a federal health insurance mandate, just a state one.

Asked Rep. Ron Paul, "Why should we have a candidate that has to explain themselves?"

The Daily Mail has some amazing photographs of wind turbines catching fire under high wind in Great Britain:

In one spectacular incident yesterday a 300ft wind turbine exploded in flames as it was buffeted by the high winds.

Another wind turbine was completely blown down on Wednesday, raising questions about the ability of wind farms to cope with the weather.

The flaming £2million wind turbine was in Ardrossan, North Ayrshire, Scotland. Witnesses said its blades were locked at the time, because the National Grid would be unable to cope with a sudden power surge....

Although ScottishPower has not blamed the weather for its collapse, Lothian and Borders Police said the turbine 'suffered brake system failure and had been freewheeling' in 50mph winds.

Charles Anglin, of RenewableUK, the trade and professional body for the UK wind and marine renewables industries, stressed that wind turbines were regularly subjected to 'some pretty tough conditions' without problem.