President Obama has done a lot of public appearances and press conferences by this point in his administration, but somehow each time he does a new one I come away marveling at what he says.

Today's press conference began with a classic Obama straw man: "Our economic challenges are not going to be solved overnight," he said. No one claims they will be. But at this point, Mr. Obama hasn't been president just "overnight," he's been president for two and a half years.

It proceeded to classic Obama misleading statements. "I spent the last two years cutting taxes for ordinary Americans," the president said. Not Americans who smoke cigarettes or use tanning salons, and not Americans who choose not to buy health insurance, all of whom the president raised taxes on.

Mr. Obama then proceeded to classic Obama divisiveness, pitting "millionaires and billionaires," "oil companies," "hedge fund managers" and "corporate jet owners," against having to "cut some kids off from getting a college scholarship." Come on. The money from the college scholarships actually winds up in the pockets of college professors, a key Democratic constituency.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a new policy statement on "Children, Adolescents, Obesity and the Media" that, according to an AAP press release, "recommends that pediatricians work with other child health advocates at the local, state and national levels for a ban on junk food advertising." No word in the release on what exactly qualifies as "junk food," or on how far the ban would extend. What's next, cigarette-package-style government-manadated gross-out pictures on potato-chip bags and candy bars?

The Obama administration has reportedly scrapped, or at least shelved, its plan to use "mystery shoppers" to call up doctor's offices pretending to be Medicare or Medicaid patients trying to get an appointment. Probably that's for the best. There are probably other ways of obtaining the information — like just sending out a survey letter to the doctors or setting up a Web site that asks doctors to respond to the question or asks patients to name doctors who refuse to treat them. These methods have the advantage of not requiring agents of the government to lie to citizens. They also won't tie up doctor's office phone lines and delay access for actual genuine patients who are in need of medical care or attention.

NPR's Planet Money has a 25 minute podcast about a "libertarian summer camp" in New Hampshire, where families run small businesses that aren't regulated by the government and that accept payment in gold and silver. All in all it's a pretty respectful treatment, including an acknowledgement by NPR Planet Money host Adam Davidson (a long-ago colleague of mine at the Forward): "We do have a lot of insane regulation in America."

Bloomberg News waddles in with its own version of the overseas profits repatriation story previously done by "60 Minutes" and the New York Times, and with a similar tilt.

The article quotes Edward D. Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles: "Why should we reward firms for successfully gaming the tax system when we in turn are called on to make up the missing tax revenues?"

Professor Kleinbard works for USC, which as a non--profit educational institution, doesn't pay any federal income taxes. For him to be complaining about corporate tax rates is hypocrisy, and Bloomberg doesn't call him on it or even point it out. Nor does the article mention that it is the high U.S. corporate tax rates relative to other jurisdictions that are driving this sort of behavior by companies.

Bloomberg columnist William Cohan seems to think that the government should criminally prosecute the executives of any business in which people make mistakes. "The continuing free passes are immensely frustrating," he writes. Another Bloomberg columnist, Roger Lowenstein, aired the opposite view last month: "to look for criminality as the supposed source of the crisis is to misread its origins badly."

The Independent Petroleum Association of America has a pretty good point-by-point takedown of the New York Times's piece over the weekend suggesting that the American natural gas industry is an Enron-style fraud. My favorite part of the IPAA critique is the light it shines on the Times's sources. From the Times:

"This kind of data is making it harder and harder to deny that the shale gas revolution is being oversold," said Art Berman, a Houston-based geologist who worked for two decades at Amoco and has been one of the most vocal skeptics of shale gas economics.

From the IPAA:

At the American Enterprise Institute's journal The American, Andrew Biggs makes the case against means-testing Social Security or Medicare as a way to balance the budget, an idea that has gained some traction recently: "the reason means tests have been unpopular in the past remains true today: they penalize people who work and save. Some may perceive this as unfair; fair or unfair, means tests have negative effects on incentives to work and save."

"Revisionists on American Revolution Brooding on Left and Right" is the headline over my latest column, which is published at the New York Sun. The subheadline is "Thomas Paine Lumped With a Traitor, A Rabbi Calls Declaration's Introduction 'Stupid,' New Yorker Bemoans 'Hysteria' Leading Up to Break With England." Read it here.

Richard Stengel, the editor of Time magazine and a former CEO of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, has an essay in Time about the Constitution:

Nor are we in danger of flipping the Constitution on its head, as some of the Tea Party faithful contend. Their view of the founding documents was pretty well summarized by Texas Congressman Ron Paul back in 2008: "The Constitution was written explicitly for one purpose — to restrain the federal government." Well, not exactly. In fact, the framers did the precise opposite. They strengthened the center and weakened the states. The states had extraordinary power under the Articles of Confederation. Most of them had their own navies and their own currencies. The truth is, the Constitution massively strengthened the central government of the U.S. for the simple reason that it established one where none had existed before.

"Obama's focus on visiting clean-tech companies raises questions" is the headline over a Washington Post article that gets into some of the issues raised here earlier in posts on Cree and Orion — the government picking winners and losers: "In all, Obama has visited 22 clean-tech projects on 19 separate trips, all emphasizing economic recovery and a $90 billion stimulus program to promote energy independence."

Mr. Obama made another move in the direction of getting the government to endorse or "partner" with individual companies with his "Advanced Manufacturing Partnership" announced last week.

Bill Bradley, the former senator from New Jersey and former Democratic presidential candidate who now works at the Allen & Co. merchant bank, has an op-ed in USA Today suggesting that President Obama give a July 4 speech proposing, "if any company employing more than 50 workers hires additional people and lays off no one, the federal government will pay 20% of the cost (that is wages and benefits) of those new employees up to $20,000 per employee."

He writes, "This program — which it should be noted will create jobs in the private (not the public) sector, a prospect that should please Republicans — would likely result in a dramatic drop in the unemployment rate....Republicans as well as Democrats should find this proposal appealing. I have recently described the program to a number of Republican businesspeople who have responded positively."

Mr. Bradley doesn't say where in the Constitution it gives the federal government the power to subsidize workers at private firms.

A "Second Opinion on the Economic Health of the American Middle Class" is the title of a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by Richard Burkhauser of Cornell University, Kosali Simon of Indiana University, and Jeff Larrimore of the Joint Committee on Taxation. Here's the abstract. The paper begins by noting that, since 1967, median household income as measured by the Census's March current population survey "has consistently grown over time controlling for short- term market conditions. However, this was not the case over the peak years (2000-2007) of the first business cycle of the 21st Century." It goes on:

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With ObamaCare passed, the left is moving on to dentistry. A senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, who is an independent and self-described socialist, is planning a hearing in the fall. An announcement on his Web site says, "the senator would like to know whether dental care is accessible to those who need it. He also wants to know whether it is affordable." It also says, "We must fight to assure that dental care is available for all people, regardless of their ability to pay."

Mr. Sanders is chairman of the Senate subcommittee on primary care and aging.