My column this week is about Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama: "two sons of divorced teen mothers who were more or less abandoned by their fathers are now the incumbent Democratic president of the United States and the Republican challenger who is leading Iowa and South Carolina polls." Please check it out at Reason (here) or the New York Sun (here).

The New Yorker has an interview with the former Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, that, alas, doesn't get into Mr. Paulson's meeting with money managers in which he tipped them off about his plans to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and wipe out their shareholders, but does disclose that "He'd been in town that week 'to see Mike Bloomberg' (board meeting for Bloomberg's charity)." Remember, the news organization that broke the story of the Paulson meeting with money managers about Fannie Mae was Bloomberg Markets magazine. It's not clear whether the reporter and editor there even knew that Mr. Paulson was on the board of Mr. Bloomberg's charity or attending its meetings as a non-member, or, if they did, how it affected the coverage, if at all. But it's the sort of thing it might have been nice to know from the Bloomberg Markets magazine article rather than from the New Yorker. It's also not clear whether Mr. Paulson was compensated for his participation in the Bloomberg charity board meeting. Anyway, it's just a little glimpse into the relationships between newsmakers and owners of news organizations.

It looks like Governor Cuomo is getting ready to try to raise personal income taxes on some upper-income New Yorkers as part of a deal that might also include some corporate or middle-class tax cuts. "Cuomo Pushes Higher Tax Rates for Big Earners," is the Web headline on a New York Times article that is slightly dialed back in some versions to "Cuomo Pushes New Tax Rates for Big Earners."

The Times doesn't exactly let Mr. Cuomo off the hook, reporting: "He campaigned on a promise of not raising taxes — 'I say no new taxes, period,' he declared on the day of his inauguration — and he repeated that message many times this year."

One of state's business lobbyists, Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, is quoted by the Times more or less surrendering. Mr. Cuomo is "appropriately changing the terms of debate from the class warfare language of the millionaires' tax advocates to focus on tax reform that promotes universal fairness," she said.

Janet Tavakoli, who was quoted in the Bloomberg Markets article as a critic of Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's information-sharing meeting about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with a group of money managers, reports that after the Bloomberg Markets article appeared, she got a call from an aide to Congressman Michael Quigley, a Democrat from Illinois, trying to defend the meeting.

Ms. Tavakoli further reports that the host of the Paulson meeting, Eric Mindich of Eton Park Capital, is "Chair of the Asset Managers' Committee of the President's Working Group on Capital Markets."

Economist Mark Perry, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has a piece up there about what Mitt Romney and President Obama call China's manipulation of its currency. He writes: "instead of complaining, we should be thankful for China's foreign aid to Americans through an undervalued yuan, overvalued dollar, and undervalued goods that collectively save American consumers and companies billions of dollars every year.... If you wouldn't object to China sending products to the United States for free, then on what basis would you object to currency 'manipulation' that allows you to purchase undervalued Chinese imports at a huge discount and great bargain?"

Link via the Wall Street Journal editorial page's "Notable & Quotable" section, which did a fine job of noticing this piece and excerpting it, but lamely doesn't provide a link back to to the piece that is quoted.

"The Muppets," the new movie from Disney about those lovable characters such as Kermit The Frog and Miss Piggy, turns out, alas, to have a somewhat heavy-handed anti-oil industry, anti-rich-person agenda. From the plot summary at the official movie Web site: "On vacation in Los Angeles, Walter, the world's biggest Muppet fan; his brother Gary, and Gary's girlfriend Amy from Smalltown, USA discover the nefarious plan of oilman Tex Richman to raze the Muppet Theater and drill for the oil recently discovered beneath."

Maybe I am taking this more seriously than I should, but really, why do these movies never seem to be about nefarious plans by evil environmentalists to turn the Muppet Theater into a wildlife refuge or windfarm, or nefarious plans by evil anti-poverty advocates to turn the Muppet Theater into "affordable" housing?

The New York Times has an editorial on the Congressional insider trading issue that makes reference to "a new study from the Hoover Institution" and "research by Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution" but doesn't mention the word "book" or give the title of Mr. Schweizer's Throw Them All Out.

From a Bloomberg view column about Cuba: "At least since 1956, the Soviet system was being criticized in the USSR itself."

The suggestion seems to be that before 1956, Russians were in such a state of bliss under Stalin that no one wanted to criticize the totalitarian rule they were under, or that those who wanted to criticize it did not have the courage to actually do it. Or that after 1956, the Soviet Union was somehow receptive to criticism from its citizens. None of those suggestions is accurate.

The lawyer and legal reform advocate Philip Howard has an essay on regulatory reform that is excerpted in the Wall Street Journal and that is worth a look. He's very good at describing the problem:

Earlier this year, the Colorado Department of Human Services propsed new rules for day-care centers. Government oversight of day-care seems like a good idea—you wouldn't want children cooped up in an airless basement—but this proposal went far beyond basic health and safety. The new rules would dictate exactly how to do just about everything: how many block sets ("at least two (2) ... with a minimum of ten (10) blocks per set"), where the children can play with the blocks (on "a flat building surface" that is "not in the main traffic area") and when caregivers must wash their hands (before "eating food," "after wiping a child's nose," etc.).

Mike Kelly, a Republican of Pennsylvania who was a car dealer before becoming a congressman, has a harsh assessment in USA Today of the Chevy Volt, which he calls "the poster child of President Obama's failed green agenda":

Like many green initiatives promoted by this administration and bankrolled by the American taxpayer, the electric car is better in theory than in practice; has limited consumer demand; is heavily subsidized; and has fallen short of reaching its targeted goals....the tax subsidies are largely going to the affluent few who can actually afford to buy an electric car, which costs anywhere between $40,000 (Chevy Volt) to $97,000 (Fisker's Karma).

Peggy Noonan adds to the theme of my Clinton 2012 post from back in September. She writes: "Bill Clinton, if he ran for president tomorrow, would probably win in a landslide." Think she's right?

In July 1995 I covered Newt Gingrich's visit to the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif. The Los Angeles Times dispatch is online here, and, while we've all changed over the past 16 years, on rereading it for a longer piece I am working on about Newt, I found it still illuminating in certain ways about Mr. Gingrich.

Smart, short post by Laura Vanderkam about income inequality in her own life:

On one hand, this seems atrociously unfair, that someone can earn more with an hour's labor than it takes someone else an entire summer to earn. On the other hand, in this example, the someone else is the same person. Over time, this same individual is able to move into work that the market rewards more. I tend to think that an ideal society would tolerate inequality but offer lots of opportunity. You work crappy jobs when you're young and unskilled but have a clear path to earning more by learning different skills.

The Bloomberg Markets scoop about 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 is attracting a bit of attention elsewhere. Ben Smith has a post at Politico pointing out that a lot of those at the meeting are Democratic political donors. And Jesse Eisinger has a post at ProPublica calling for a congressional inquiry to get to the bottom of whether any of those at the meeting made money by shorting Fannie or Freddie after the tip from Secretary Paulson. But the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and CNBC have held back from the full-scale pile-on or swarm that you sometimes see on a big or not-so-big story like, say, Governor Perry's memory lapse. Maybe it's because Henry Paulson is out of office. Or maybe the other news organizations don't want to give Bloomberg Markets credit for the scoop that Bloomberg Markets developed out of envy or out of a desire not to call attention to the fact that they didn't develop the news on their own.

"For most newspapers in the United States, we would not buy them at any price...They have the possibility of nearly unending losses. ... I do not see anything on the horizon that sees that erosion coming to an end." — Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, 2009, as reported by Reuters.

"Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett and Terry Kroeger, CEO of the Omaha World-Herald Company, owner of The World-Herald, six other daily newspapers and several weekly newspapers across Nebraska and Southwest Iowa announced that Berkshire will acquire the Omaha World-Herald Company. ...In addition to the Omaha World-Herald, the purchase includes daily newspapers in Council Bluffs, Ia., Grand Island, York, Kearney, North Platte and Scottsbluff in Nebraska, in addition to many weeklies and shoppers in the two states." — Berkshire Hathaway press release, November 30, 2011.

I guess the most important word in Mr. Buffett's 2009 comment was "most."