Libertarian law professor has a new piece up about Justice Stevens and his book Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir: "Tell-all books by former justices cannot do much good."

It's hard to escape the feeling that President Obama is enthusiastic about the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Late last week, his senior adviser, David Plouffe, told the Washington Post that his campaign intends to make anti-Wall Street sentiment "one of the central elements of the campaign next year."

At a press conference earlier this month, Mr. Obama said the protest "expresses the frustrations that the American people feel -- that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country, all across Main Street, and yet you're still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on abusive practices that got us into this problem in the first place. So, yes, I think people are frustrated, and the protestors are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works."

This one is from Representatives Trent Franks, Rob Bishop, Jeff Flake, Paul Gosar, David Schweikert and Ben Quayle, and Senators John McCain, Orrin Hatch, and Mike Lee: Pass the Northern Arizona Mining Continuity Act. That would prevent the Obama administration's Interior Department from halting uranium mining in Northern Arizona. Says Congressman Gosar: "if the Administration's proposed withdrawal is enacted, the potential for nearly $30 billion dollars of economic growth opportunities – nearly $700 million annually and over a thousand well paying jobs – will be eliminated."

Earlier: Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 25: Pass the Employment Protection Act, requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to consider the jobs impact of any new regulation, new policy statement or permit denial.

This one comes from the senator from Pennsylvania, Pat Toomey: Pass the Employment Protection Act, which would require the Environmental Protection Agency to consider the jobs impact of any new regulation, new policy statement or permit denial. Says Senator Toomey: "Pennsylvania and the country deserve a booming recovery, but that won't happen so long as the EPA continues to impose new, excessive burdens and red tape on our farms, manufacturers, and other important industries. The Employment Protection Act will force the EPA to take a more balanced approach and start considering the economic impact of their regulatory decisions."

Earlier: Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 24: Pass fast-track trade promotion authority.

Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 23: Deregulate the bond-rating agencies.

The Republicans are having another presidential debate Tuesday October 18 in Las Vegas, telecast at 8 p.m. eastern time on CNN. My latest column, which is up at Reason.com, gives some questions I'd like to see asked or answered there. You can check the column out here.

The New Yorker has a profile of the new editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson:

An editorial voice in news stories adds credence to the frequent charge that the Times' news reporting often displays a liberal bias—a critique that will not be lessened by the elevation of a woman brought up in a liberal-Democratic household on the West Side of Manhattan who worked for liberal Southern Democrats and wrote a book asserting that Clarence Thomas probably lied....To celebrate her return to the city, in 2003, Abramson got a small tattoo on her right shoulder that replicates an old subway token. It was intended, she says, as a tribute to the subway system, which she rides and which she associates with her home town....

What a wonderful Wall Street Journal editorial page to start off the week!

Gordon Crovitz, who lives a block away from the Occupy Wall Street protest, has written THE best piece yet anywhere about it. He quotes a letter from the owner of the property being occupied: "Complaints range from outrage over numerous laws being broken including but not limited to lewdness, groping, drinking and drug use to the lack of safe access to and usage of the park, to the ongoing noise at all hours, to unsanitary conditions and to offensive odors."

Amity Shlaes has a fine column about how some developments in the late 1970s helped set the stage for the boom of the 1980s and thereafter. Her point about "the Steiger Amendment, which halved the capital gains rate, to an effective 25%," is particularly well taken.

Edward Jay Epstein has posted a long piece on "The Milken Revolution and Its Consequences," an excerpt of Mr. Epstein's new e-book, The Money Demons.

On Milken:

He undertook, as a matter of routine, to work a fifteen hour day. He usually arrives at the trading room at 4:30 a.m.-- toting two dog-eared canvas bags full of reports and memosthat he had taken home to read-- and remains there until at least 7:30 at night. "Lunch,"usually a sandwich and soda, is brought in on a tray for him, and everyone else, at 10a.m. He neither smokes or drinks-- not even coffee, explaining, "I don't need stimulants."

More: "By concentrating on the first component in his equation--the historical balance sheet-- the rating services had seriously neglected the other component--future cash flow. 'And that what bonds are all about-- getting paid off in the future,' he added."

David Limbaugh has a column about President Obama's persistence in pursuing certain projects that don't seem very popular with the public — ObamaCare, a second stimulus, stricter emissions standards, high-speed rail. Mr. Limbaugh doesn't get into it, but there were moments when it seemed like President George W. Bush was doing the same thing, once the Iraq War became less popular, or when he tried to get personal accounts as part of Social Security. If a politician succeeds in eventually bringing the public along, it's seen as leadership; if he doesn't, it's seen as obstinacy, or worse. The nice thing about elections is that they give voters a chance to reassess every few years the match between what the politicians want done and what the voters want done.

This one is from Senator Mitch McConnell: Give the administration "fast track" trade promotion authority of the sort that allowed the negotiation of the Panama, Colombia, and South Korea free trade agreements that the Senate finally approved recently.

Earlier: Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 23: Deregulate the bond-rating agencies.

Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 22: Balance the budget by cutting spending and dealing with entitlements.

Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 21: repeal the Dodd-Frank financial "reform" legislation

The post from yesterday on Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan generated five comments from reader-participant-watchdog-community member-content co-creators, which are worth a look. At least two other perspectives on the plan are worth considering.

The American Enterprise Institute's Alan Viard contends that the 9% business or corporate income tax isn't really that, but is in fact more of a value-added tax:

A VAT and a retail sales tax are conceptually equivalent consumption taxes, apart from administrative and compliance issues. The plan is therefore better described as featuring a 9 percent income tax and an 18 percent consumption tax, with half of the latter collected using the VAT methodology and the other half collected using the retail sales tax methodology.

This one is from a comment by reader-participant-community-member-watchdog-content co-creator Josh Fulton and builds on an earlier post here on "Regulating the Raters": eliminate the federal and state laws and regulations that enshrine the judgment of a few Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations. That might cost a few jobs at Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch, but it would also open up the field for growth, competition, and job-creation among new firms. It addition to creating jobs, it might also provide investors with better information.

Earlier: Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 22: Balance the budget by cutting spending and dealing with entitlements.

Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 21: repeal the Dodd-Frank financial "reform" legislation

With a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll out today showing Herman Cain leading the Republican field and a Rasmussen Poll out today showing Mr. Cain tied with Governor Romney for the lead, Mr. Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan is getting more scrutiny. It would replace the payroll tax, the estate tax, the capital gains tax, and the current individual and business income taxes with a 9% corporate income tax, a 9% personal income tax, and a 9% national sales tax.

The Emergency Committee for Israel has put out a one minute Youtube video portraying Occupy Wall Street of being a bunch of anti-Semites.

Meanwhile, the Web site of the Jewish newspaper has an article and two minute, 46 second video of a Yom Kippur service at Occupy Wall Street.

This post by a former Amazon employee now at Google about the difference between platforms and products (and why platforms are better) is pretty interesting and almost Hayekian at points. On Amazon's Jeff Bezos: "The other big realization he had was that he can't always build the right thing. I think Larry Tesler might have struck some kind of chord in Bezos when he said his mom couldn't use the goddamn website....I'm not really sure how Bezos came to this realization -- the insight that he can't build one product and have it be right for everyone."