"Mandatory Contraceptive Insurance Is Urged" is the headline over a New York Times news article on a recommendation to the secretary of health and human services by an influential panel that, under ObamaCare, "insurers should be forbidden to charge co-payments for contraceptives and other preventive services because even small charges could deter their use."

Some thoughts on the News Corp. situation:

Will President Obama stop in to save the Borders bookstore chain and the 10,000 jobs there the same way that taxpayer dollars were used to rescue or take over General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Bank of America? National Review has a satire:

"If Republicans allow this American icon to go out of business," warned Obama, "American literacy will plummet and our children will not be able to compete internationally for the jobs of tomorrow."

At today's committee hearing, Rupert Murdoch offered a suggestion to prevent government officials from being tempted by bribes from journalists or anyone else — pay the government officials more. He offered the example of Singapore, where, he said, every minister is paid more than a million dollars a year, and it's the "cleanest society you'll find anywhere."

USA Today has the latest in a string of dispatches on how federal employees are in some ways better off than those in the private sector:

Federal employees' job security is so great that workers in many agencies are more likely to die of natural causes than get laid off or fired, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Death — rather than poor performance, misconduct or layoffs — is the primary threat to job security at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and a dozen other federal operations.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein writes:

Republicans should treat all three forms of government financing as functional equivalents, and thus push for that deal which, subject to the caveats raised above, works the greatest cut in total expenditures. Following this reasoning, it is better to cut expenditures by $5 trillion over the next decade and raise taxes by $1 trillion over that same period, than it is to cut expenditures by only $3 trillion, without any current tax increase.

This may be a bit naive, because a few years into any of these decade-long deals, Congress will be tempted to increase spending, which will only add to pressure to eventually raise taxes to pay for it. So what looks, at the start of ten years, like a $4 trillion net spending cut may, by the end of the ten years, be a $0 net spending cut that leaves the country in a debt hole and under pressure to increase taxes at the end of the period.

Later on in the piece, Professor Epstein makes a pro-growth case for a flat tax:

ABC News has an exit interview with Harvard professor-turned-financial-regulator Elizabeth Warren, who declares, "I'm not through throwing rocks." What a curious, as in strange, way for a regulator to describe her own actions. Perhaps it's apt, if one considers the property damage and the inexact aim. She's being mentioned as a possible candidate for United States Senate from Massachusetts.

"Distorting Reagan's Record" is the headline Reason.com put on my latest weekly column, about President Reagan's suddenly popular (in certain circles) 1982 tax increase. Read it here.

A factory in Americus, Georgia is turning out what a television report says are 2 million chopsticks a day for export to China and other Asian markets.

A couple of items that deserve follow-up: After Friday's post on President Obama's snub of the Dalai Lama, Mr. Obama did on Saturday welcome the Tibetan to the White House. Ellen Bork has details.

A professor at the University of Chicago, Steven Davis, writes on Bloomberg: "The extension of unemployment benefits eligibility to 99 weeks under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 lessened the financial incentives for job losers to search for work and to accept positions with low pay. It also increased the number of unemployed in name only -- those who go through the motions of job seeking to collect unemployment benefits, but who would have left the labor force absent the extension."

Link via Professor Mankiw.

John Carney has a provocative post up at CNBC under the headline, "Where Are the Tax Cutters?" He writes, "The Republicans, which were once the Grand Old Party of tax cuts and growth, have become the 'hold the line' party, arguing that taxes should be kept at current levels and borrowing reduced. Spending cuts are an after-thought, something made necessary by the urgently felt desire to reduce deficits. Tax cuts aren't even on the table."

"What's Missing From the Budget Debate" is the headline over a piece by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins in Forbes:

Rand's ideas are indispensable in the struggle to limit government: they provide the key to answering the moral argument for the entitlement state.

That argument, Rand argued, rests on an ethical precept we've been taught since childhood: your neighbor's need is a claim on your wealth and property. You are, in short, your brother's keeper.

Well, if so, then you must keep your brother by providing him with a guaranteed retirement (Social Security), an endless supply of medical care (Medicare, Medicaid, S-CHIP), a roof over his head (public housing), and an education for his kids (public schooling). If self-sacrifice for the needs of others is a moral imperative, then so is the entitlement state.

When Ryan's critics call his budget immoral, they are counting on a simple train of logic: Since the entitlement state is a moral imperative, anyone who wants to cut it back is at war with morality.

The New Yorker has a profile of Ray Dalio, the manager of the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund, which starts, ritualistically, by noting, "Dalio is rich—preposterously rich. Last year alone, he earned between two and three billion dollars, and reached No. 55 on the Forbes 400 list." Much lower down the article reports, "Forbes estimates his net worth at six billion dollars." One has to read pretty far down into the piece to find out that he started the firm in 1975, at age 26, after being fired, operating it out of his two-bedroom apartment.

That's the thing about rich people often forgotten by those who want to raise their taxes or complain about how preposterous their wealth is; many of them didn't start out rich. They got there by taking risks and by working hard for long periods of time. That two or three billion that Mr. Dalio earned last year represents in some sense a return on something that Mr. Dalio spent 30 years building.

Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist syndicated by the Washington Post writers group, takes aim at his own newspaper's news coverage:

A pliant press swallows the White House story line: the great compromiser ("clearly exasperated," sympathized a Post news story) being stymied by Republican "intransigence" (the noun actually used in another front-page Post news story to describe the Republican position on taxes).

I emailed Lori Montgomery, the journalist whose byline is atop both the articles criticized by Dr. Krauthammer, to see if she had any response to the criticism, and she emailed back a one-word reply: "No."