Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweizer's new book Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us To Prison was the subject of a segment on "60 Minutes" last night. From the "60 Minutes" piece:

former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband have participated in at least eight IPOs. One of those came in 2008, from Visa, just as a troublesome piece of legislation that would have hurt credit card companies, began making its way through the House. Undisturbed by a potential conflict of interest the Pelosis purchased 5,000 shares of Visa at the initial price of $44 dollars. Two days later it was trading at $64. The credit card legislation never made it to the floor of the House....

Texas Governor Rick Perry recovered well from his memory lapse in the last debate, dominating the Saturday night CBS News - National Journal national security debate with a proposal to take the U.S. foreign aid budget to zero at the start of his presidency.

"The foreign aid budget in my administration for every country is going to start at zero dollars. And then we'll have a conversation," Mr. Perry said.

When the debate moderator asked Newt Gingrich if he agreed with Mr. Perry, the former House Speaker replied, "absolutely."

Later in the debate, Governor Romney volunteered his own agreement with Governor Perry: "You start everything at zero."

The only two candidates to voice disagreement with Mr. Perry on the topic were Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann. Congresswoman Bachmann said, "I would not agree with that assessment to pull all foreign aid from Pakistan." And Mr. Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, said the foreign aid creates jobs in America because military aid dollars are spent on American weapons manufactured by American workers.

A front-page news article in today's New York Times takes a look at Europe's sovereign debt woes and places the blame firmly on regulators, not bankers. From the article: "How European sovereign debt became the new subprime is a story with many culprits, including governments that borrowed beyond their means, regulators who permitted banks to treat the bonds as risk-free and investors who for too long did not make much of a distinction between the bonds of troubled economies like Greece and Italy and those issued by the rock-solid Germany."

More:

Regulators bear much of the responsibility. Before 1999, when Europe forged its monetary union, regulators permitted banks to treat as risk-free the debt of any country that belonged to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of developed nations that includes the United States and most of Europe.

In the post yesterday on the proposed federal Christmas Tree Tax, I wrote: "My guess is it will take the Obama administration approximately 24 hours, or one Rush Limbaugh show, before it backs down on this one."

Turns out I was close. From Fox News: "The White House has decided to sideline a proposed fee on Christmas trees, after the fee was ridiculed by critics as a tax on Christmas....White House spokesman Matt Lehrich told Fox News on Wednesday afternoon that the administration is putting a stop to the proposal."

President Obama is reportedly going to delay a decision on the Keystone XL Canada oil sands pipeline until after the 2012 election.

That way, if he loses, he can wait for a new Republican president to approve the pipeline, and the environmentalists can all be mad at the Republican instead of at Obama.

And delaying it rather than just killing it outright probably makes it slightly harder for Republicans to accuse him of killing jobs and contributing to high energy prices.

Sometimes the best decision is not to make a decision, but it's not clear to me that this is one of those times.

Thanks to reader-watchdog-content co-creator-community member-participant E.T. for the tip.

Ann Coulter has a theory on the Herman Cain story:

Suspicions had already fallen on Sheila O'Grady, who is close with David Axelrod and went straight from being former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley's chief of staff to president of the Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA), as being the person who dug up Herman Cain's personnel records from the National Restaurant Association (NRA).

The Daley-controlled IRA works hand-in-glove with the NRA. And strangely enough, Cain's short, three-year tenure at the NRA is evidently the only period in his decades-long career during which he's alleged to have been a sexual predator.

Mario Batali, whose comments likening bankers to Hitler and Stalin were the topic of a post here yesterday, has apologized, the Wall Street Journal reports. Neither the Journal nor the New York Times, which also reports on the issue, is able to come up with a single banker who will speak on the record with his or her name attached to condemn the comments or defend the banking profession. One might chalk that up to lame reporting (surely the reporters could find some banker who would talk if enough were called) or to shrewd public relations by the bankers (let the focus stay on Mr. Batali) or to the reluctance of bankers to defend themselves, driven by either a belief that they won't get a fair shake in the press, by self-doubt about their own activities, or by some other reason.

The top news out of tonight's CNBC Republican presidential debate was probably Governor Rick Perry's memory lapse, in which he couldn't remember the third cabinet department he wanted to eliminate. He started with Commerce and Education, but he just couldn't remember what the third one was, even when pressed. "I can't...the third one....I can't. Sorry. Oops," he said, in a way that made me just feel sorry for the poor man. He should read Joshua Foer's Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.

Much later in the debate, Mr. Perry said, "By the way, that was the Department of Energy I was reaching for a while ago."

Celebrity chef Mario Batali likens bankers to Hitler and Stalin and doesn't apologize, while Brett Ratner makes a joke about homosexuals and issues an abject, groveling apology. No defense of Mr. Ratner, but it does highlight how there are some groups that it's clearly off limits to label, target, or insult, while there are other groups upon which it is open season. Smokers and bankers are some of the few groups out there on which it is clearly open season. Some people may distinguish that it is a choice to go into banking or to start smoking, while it's not a choice to be gay, or black, or a woman, or other groups that it is less socially acceptable to insult or stereotype. Maybe so, but others of us would aspire to treat all individuals as individual human beings rather than as group-members to be insulted, stereotyped, smeared, and generalized about. I may be guilty of this too on this site sometimes when I write about left wingers or the Obama administration. But I don't think I've ever likened them to mass murderers. If I have, I hereby do what Mr. Batali hasn't done, which is apologize.

Partly because I was invited by Harold Evans, and partly because the event had a tie-in with the new book Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, by my former New York Sun colleague Nicholas Wapshott, and partly because there aren't that many Hayek events in New York, I ventured out last night for a Thomson Reuters-sponsored debate between Keynesians and Hayekians.

John Cassidy of the New Yorker was there representing the Keynes side, though he said he could have represented Hayek as well. He called Hayek "one of the most important economists of the 20th Century," but said "on macroeconomics he got things completely wrong." He said even Rep. Paul Ryan, who argued for tax cuts in 2001 on the grounds that they would "juice the economy," was a Keynesian.

Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 14 was ending state and local blue laws that keep retailers closed, or restrict sales of certain items, on Sundays. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that voters in Georgia moved in that direction: "Georgia's age-old, all-out ban on buying beer, wine and liquor at shops on Sunday has met its end. Early poll results had voters in most of the 51 metro Atlanta jurisdictions giving a resounding yes Tuesday to seven days of package sales in referendums, continuing the slow dissolution of a blue law dating to the late 1800s, one of the last restraints on Sunday consumption."

In the "You Can't Make This Stuff Up" Department is this, from the Heritage Foundation:

President Obama's Agriculture Department today announced that it will impose a new 15-cent charge on all fresh Christmas trees—the Christmas Tree Tax—to support a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.

From Mike Allen's Politico Playbook:

FCC today to announce $9.95/month broadband Internet to the homes of all school-lunch-eligible families...FCC & 'CONNECT TO COMPETE' TACKLE BARRIERS TO BROADBAND ADOPTION: NEW LOW-COST BROADBAND AND COMPUTER OFFERINGS FOR ELIGIBLE SCHOOL LUNCH CHILDREN & THEIR FAMILIES -- $4 BILLION, UNPRECEDENTED IN-KIND OFFER FOR UP TO 25 MILLION AMERICANS -- BUILDS ON FCC'S DIGITAL LITERACY ANNOUNCEMENT -- BIGGEST EFFORT EVER TO HELP CLOSE THE DIGITAL DIVIDE: In May 2011, Chairman Genachowski challenged the broadband ecosystem to help close the adoption gap. Today, at a public school in Washington, D.C., Chairman Genachowski applauded executives and nonprofit leaders from leading Internet service providers, technology companies and nonprofits for their unprecedented multi-billion dollar in-kind commitments to empower millions of families with broadband Internet, PCs, and digital literacy training, with zero cost to taxpayers."

From a report in today's Wall Street Journal:

Weill Cornell Medical College will announce on Wednesday the identities of the benefactors behind a $100 million donation to fund a new medical research facility that anchors an effort to catapult the school into the country's top tier.

Here a lot of us thought Cornell was already a top tier medical school. U.S. News ranks it no. 17 for research out of about 130 medical schools in the country. And the school itself reports "Weill Cornell receives close to 6,000 applications for 101 positions in the entering class."

Walmart, which is already providing significant banking services, is looking to get into health care in a big way, NPR reports. From a 14-page request for information Walmart distributed to potential partners: