Four days after the post here noting the quick rise of Joel Klein within News Corp., the New York Times waddles in with a big front-page Sunday piece on the same topic. From the article:

Some in Mr. Klein's social circle were startled by his decision to join the News Corporation's right-leaning news empire.

"What? You're going to work for Rupert Murdoch?" David Gergen, a former adviser for Bill Clinton, recalled asking his friend.

Mr. Klein was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, though he had taken a more conservative tack on education. He rarely took vacations, but when he did he went to the Dominican Republic, where the fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, a friend, held parties that became a retreat for Democrats, including the Clintons.

The lawyers News Corp. has hired to represent it include former attorney general Michael Mukasey and former Justice Department official Mark Mendelsohn, ProPublica reports. When Paul, Weiss announced that Mr. Mendelsohn was joining as a partner last year, its press release said he "is internationally acknowledged and respected as the architect and key enforcement official of the DOJ's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement program."

Politico's Ben Smith and Byron Tau take a look at some of President Obama's "bundlers," those who raise a lot of campaign cash for him. A lot of them are in industries that are either highly regulated or subsidized:

Steve Westly, a major investor in the electric car company Tesla, bundled up to $200,000 for the president this cycle — while his company received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy.

Three smaller loans and grants went to three other companies that Westly is involved in. Obama has since appointed him to a special energy panel. Westly bundled up to $500,000 in 2008 as well and hosted the president at his house during a 2010 Democratic fundraiser.

Arnold Kling has "A Rant Against Non-Profits," asserting, "non-profits are for people who would rather dictate to customers than serve them," and that "Many non-profits owe much of their funding to government grants. And other non-profits owe their existence to the desire of donors to push political agendas."

I agree non-profits have their problems, but there are also plenty of for-profits that owe much of their funding, or even their existence or survival, to government contracts, grants, or subsidies. And as a customer of the non-profit that publishes Mr. Kling, the Liberty Fund, I usually feel well-served, rather than dictated to, by Mr. Kling, so maybe he's being a bit too harsh or painting with too broad a brush. At least, he doesn't really deal with how his own specific case fits into his generalizations.

Congratulations to David Leonhardt, reportedly the New York Times' 38-year-old newly promoted Washington Bureau Chief. Those interested in knowing more about the person who will now be directing the paper's Washington news coverage may be interested in some of our earlier coverage of Mr. Leonhardt's work here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

President Obama has an op-ed in USA Today:

Before we stop funding clean energy research, we should ask oil companies and corporate jet owners to give up the tax breaks that other companies don't get. Before we ask college students to pay more, we should ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries. Before we ask seniors to pay more for Medicare, we should ask people like me to give up tax breaks they don't need and never asked for.

The number of questionable assumptions packed into these three sentences is really something.

The president of Americans for Tax Reform, Gover Norquist, has an op-ed in the New York Times: "Federal spending in the 2008 fiscal year was $2.9 trillion, and Washington will now spend $3.8 trillion in the fiscal year that ends on Sept. 30....There is only one fix for a spending problem: spend less."

Framing it that way, with 2008 as the baseline, makes it sound like it's President Obama's fault, and, in some ways, it is. But if you use the last year of the Clinton administration rather than the last year of the George W. Bush administration as the benchmark, the starting number for federal outlays is about $1.8 trillion in 2000, rather than $2.9 trillion in 2008. Both the most recent Republican president (George W. Bush) and the most recent Democratic president (Barack Obama) have increased spending by about $1 trillion apiece. Mr. Obama has managed to do it in less than three years, while it took Mr. Bush his full term. I do agree with Mr. Norquist that it is a spending problem.

The July 15 issue of the Vineyard Gazette just reached me here in New York City, and, for a usually somewhat left-leaning newspaper in President Obama's frequent vacation destination, it was quite a surprise when I got to the editorial page. First was a piece extolling the virtues of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged": "If you have a job or are unemployed, you should read this book. ...If you wonder why the economy is not doing better, if you are afraid that government is getting too big, you must read this book." Then was a piece, under the headline "Wind Power Full Of Hot Air and Worse," quoting Bjorn Lomborg and denouncing wind energy.

Keith Hennessey offers 17 reasons he opposes the "Gang of Six" budget plan, and James Capretta warns, "It's a terrible, terrible plan. It will hand the president a huge strategic victory and deliver nothing that the GOP should be seeking in this fight."

Responding to yesterday's post about the imbalance of recommending ObamaCare mandate contraceptive coverage by insurers but not IVF, a FutureOfCapitalism reader-participant-watchdog-community member-content co-creator pointed me to a little-known and relatively new New York State government program that "subsidizes higher level infertility treatments in vitro fertilization (IVF) and gamete intra fallopian transfer (GIFT) for privately insured women for whom these procedures are not covered by insurance."

The Bloomberg Large Solar Index, which includes 17 companies, has fallen 29% in the last three months, versus a 1.1% gain in the S&P 500 Index over the same period, Bloomberg News reports. The article quotes the manager of "the best- performing clean energy fund over the past year among 75 tracked by Bloomberg" as saying that he is short-selling polysilicon makers. It's interesting that you can have a "clean energy fund" that shorts clean energy firms.

NPR has a piece that notices a key point: while Congress and President Obama may eliminate the $6 billion a year ethanol subsidy, they aren't retreating at all on the mandate to blend gasoline with ethanol:

the government forces oil companies to use ethanol. And that mandate is growing. Next year, it will call for more ethanol than the industry produced this year.

That government mandate renders the tax credit irrelevant, says Bruce Babcock of Iowa State University....the ethanol mandate has a lot more friends than the subsidy did — and it's not likely to change anytime soon.

Media bias aids Democratic candidates "about 8 to 10 percentage points," in a typical election, a professor of political science at UCLA , Tim Groseclose, claims in his new book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind.

The book cites a series of experiments and research conducted by the author and others. In one, researchers looked at markets in which Fox News was available in 2000 and markets in which it wasn't. "George W. Bush's vote share was 0.43 percent higher in Fox markets than it was in non-Fox markets," the book reports. In another experiment, Yale researchers bought Virginia residents gift subscriptions to either the Washington Times or the Washington Post. The ones who were randomly assigned to the more left-leaning Post voted for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate 3.8 percentage points more than those who were randomly assigned the more right-leaning Times.

This "Gang of Six" Senate deficit/debt reduction plan consists of a lot of vague promises to save money far, far in the future ("Review total federal health care spending starting in 2020"), but the tax reform in it is worth focusing on, just in terms of ideas that could garner some bipartisan support in the Senate. From a PDF summary circulating this morning (I got it from Mike Allen's Politico Playbook, which says it came from Kaiser Health News): "Simplify the tax code by reducing the number of tax expenditures and reducing individual tax rates, by establishing three tax brackets with rates of 8–12 percent, 14–22 percent, and 23–29 percent...Establish a single corporate tax rate between 23 percent and 29 percent." Remember, the top federal individual income tax rate now is 35%, and the top federal corporate income tax rate is 35%, so these are rate reductions, though there's little-to-no detail in the PDF on what "tax expenditures" are being targeted.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has an interview about energy, expressing severe skepticism about the areas to which the government is directing subsidies:

If you're going for cuteness, the stuff in the home is the place to go. It's really kind of cool to have solar panels on your roof. But if you're really interested in the energy problem, it's those big things in the desert....despite often-heard claims to the contrary, ethanol has nothing to do with reducing CO₂; it's just a form of farm subsidy. If you're using first-class land for biofuels, then you're competing with the growing of food. And so you're actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture. For rich people, this is OK. For poor people, this is a real problem, because their food budget is an extremely high percentage of their income. As we're pushing these things, poor people are driven from having adequate food to not having adequate food...