"We're not Greece. We're not Portugal," President Obama insisted at today's press conference. If we were in such great shape, though, the president probably wouldn't have to be running around making those kinds of distinctions. The president's press conferences are getting to be so frequent that they're becoming less newsworthy, and more formulaic.

Yet again today, Mr. Obama called for "a balanced approach that includes some revenue," or, what in plain English, are tax increases. While insisting doggedly on those tax increases, he accused Republicans of "ideologically rigid positions" and a "my way or the highway" approach.

The president used the word "Armageddon" to refer to a failure to raise the debt ceiling.

"It's important for the American people that everybody in this town sets politics aside," the president said, clearly eying the political benefits that would accrue to him if Republicans "set politics aside" long enough to agree to tax increases that would alienate their base.

The Foreign Policy Initiative's Ellen Bork writes:

Although the Dalai Lama has been in Washington for nine days, President Obama has not yet met the Tibetan leader or top officials of the Tibetan democratic exile government traveling with him.

President Obama snubbed the Dalai Lama once before, refusing to see him in 2009; and Obama's treatment of him in their 2010 meeting was roundly criticized. Now the White House appears to be preparing the way for another snub. The president can't claim he's too busy with the debt ceiling negotiations, as Speaker of the House John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, also deeply engaged in those talks, found time to welcome the Dalai Lama to Capitol Hill.

Enough with the talk of "sacrifice," writes Jonathan Hoenig. "A capitalist economy doesn't require anyone's sacrifice."

National Public Radio has a nasty profile up of Eric Cantor, the House majority leader.

Issue no. 1: "Cantor, who has a perfect rating from the American Conservative Union." Uh, actually, according to the American Conservative Union's own Web site, Cantor's lifetime ACU rating is 97 out of 100. Not bad, but not perfect.

Issue no. 2: "In a 2003 interview with the conservative Insight on the News online magazine, Cantor...described himself like this: 'Someone who likes to work toward consensus, somebody who desires to work with all different types of people.' Times have changed, and, Democrats may argue, so has Eric Cantor."

Conrad Black writes in the Financial Times: "Discerning people should not be impressed by the process familiar to me and other victims of it, of hostile media solemnly citing law professors and retired prosecutors and sources who spoke on condition of anonymity (usually tendentious fantasies of the journalists themselves), to comment on the Murdochs' legal problems."

The Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney notices GE's latest tax maneuver: a 30-year, $9.3 million property tax abatement from the city of Dayton, Ohio for an "Electrical Power Integrated Systems Research and Development Center" that promises "new advanced electrical power technologies...from new power systems for aircraft to longer-range electric cars to smarter utility power grids for more efficient delivery of electricity."

The $9.3 million tax abatement comes on top of a $7.6 million grant to the center from the taxpayer-funded "Ohio Third Frontier Commission."

The Wall Street Journal has a news article on how the Minnesota government shutdown is threatening alcoholic beverage sales: "More than 300 bars and liquor stores can't buy beer, wine or liquor to sell to consumers because their $20 alcohol-purchasing licenses, known as buyer's cards, have expired, a casualty of the July 1 shutdown...Meanwhile, state officials told MillerCoors LLC, the second-largest beer maker in the U.S. behind Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, that it must remove all 39 brands of its beer from shelves statewide because its $1,170 brand-label registration fee wasn't processed before the shutdown."

As is sometimes the case, the commenters on the Journal site are more astute than the news reporters: "Tell me, why does a business need a license to buy perfectly legal goods for sale?" writes one. Says another: "Legislators should make note of all the commercial problems caused by trivial regulations, such as licensing requirements and repeal those regulations at the first opportunity."

Stanford economist John B. Taylor, writing at Bloomberg:

A good two-step approach would be to agree now to $2.5 trillion in spending-growth reductions and to raise the debt ceiling. Then have an open debate about how to close the remaining $3.5 trillion gap next year, during the 2012 election campaign.

Democrats might propose to close the shortfall with $2 trillion in revenue increases and $1.5 trillion in spending reductions; Obama could make that explicit in his budget submission in February 2012. The Republicans could propose to close the whole gap with spending reductions; indeed all the Republican candidates for president have proposed this already.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. makes this point about the New York Times going after Rupert Murdoch: "What is The New York Times doing day after day filling its front pages with infantile hysteria? This is the same newspaper that published secret American intelligence documents hacked by the suppliers of WikiLeaks on its front pages. Presumably, innocent people were victims of terrorists because of it, possibly American soldiers. What hypocrisy by the Times to put a hacking story on its front page day after day and to complain about the Murdoch press's hacking story."

The Washington Examiner's Conn Carroll writes:

Up until now the liberal media has been dutifully playing along with the preferred White House script that Obama is the "adult in the room" far above Washington politics. But at some point the facts will make it impossible for them to play along. It was Obama who played classic Washington politics by avoiding the tough budgetary decisions and appointed a debt commission. Then he cynically dismissed their work once they were done. Then Obama released a budget so out of touch with reality that the Senate rejected it 97-0. Then, when the House Republicans took a hard vote on a real budget scored by the Congressional Budget Office, Obama publicly rebuked House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and then presented his own plan that was so vague the CBO refused to even score it.

The self-described socialist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, is not someone I agree with that often, but he's onto something here, at least in recognizing a problem, if not necessarily the solution: "One report said obstacles to acquiring local permits add up to $2,500 to the cost of a typical residential solar installation. The Department of Energy also identified local permitting costs as an obstacle to further lowering solar energy costs." Senator Sanders's solution is for the federal government to spend tens of millions of dollars helping the local governments simplify their permitting processes. It seems to me that if simplicity is the goal, adding a federal grant application to the mix isn't going to help. But it's nice, nonetheless, to see someone on the left recognize regulation as an obstacle.

For his Pittsburgh Tribune-Review column, George Mason University's Donald Boudreaux reprints an abridged version of Frederic Bastiat's classic 1845 satirical essay in which French candle-makers petition the government to ban sunlight.

Whatever the penalty is for paying off policemen (and ProPublica suggests there could be issues related to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or the SEC) it doesn't seem to me that it should prevent shareholders in a company unrelated to the bribery from selling what they own. But that's the punishment — without a trial — that seems to have been imposed on News Corp. The Associated Press reports from London: "Murdoch had hoped to gain control of the 61 percent of BSkyB shares that his News Corp. doesn't yet own, but the bid was delayed for several months while the British government's Competition Commission reviewed monopoly concerns." News Corp. reportedly dropped the bid today. Who is punished here? News Corp.? Or the owners of the 61% of BSkyB who had wanted to sell, but whose deal has now been torpedoed, in essence, by the British government? The idea that the British government, which itself uses tax revenues to fund the BBC's eight national television channels, is worried about Mr. Murdoch amassing a television monopoly is absurd. What about the BBC's monopoly? With online video, the entry barriers to television are getting lower by the day, anyway.

Two Harvard-affiliated researchers, David Ludwig and Lindsey Murtagh, have a piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association that says the government should take children away from their parents if the children weigh too much. According to their Journal article, "Even relatively mild parenting deficiencies, such as having excessive junk food in the home or failing to model a physically active lifestyle, may contribute to a child's weight problem."

USA Today has more: "'Despite the discomfort posed by state intervention, it may sometimes be necessary to protect a child,' Murtagh said."

Jordan A. Thomas, who spent the past eight years "as an Assistant Director and Assistant Chief Litigation Counsel in the SEC's Division of Enforcement," and who "notably... played a leadership role in the development and implementation of the SEC's Whistleblower Program, which was enacted by the Dodd-Frank Act in July 2010, with the related implementing rules becoming effective this August" is joining the securities class-action law firm Labaton Sucharow LLP to launch its "Whistleblower Representation Practice," the firm announced.

The release helpfully notes that "the statute provides whistleblowers with enhanced anti-retaliation protections and substantial financial incentives, between 10-30% of the monetary sanctions collected, for providing original information to the SEC about violations of the federal securities laws." The chairman of the firm, Lawrence A. Sucharow, is quoted in the release referring to Mr. Jordan's "unique insight into the SEC's whistleblower program."