Judd Gregg, who was the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations; Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committees, is going to work for Goldman Sachs, reports the Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney, who keeps a close eye on the revolving door.

Steve Forbes, writing in the June 6 issue of Forbes:

An immediate trap GOPers should be extremely wary of is that we should start means testing for Social Security and Medicare in order to save both programs. Otherwise sensible conservatives are glomming onto the idea that cutting and then eliminating Social Security benefits for retirees making $60,000 a year or more would work wonders for saving the system.

This notion is immoral, a breach of trust. The bargain between our government and its citizens, which is at the foundation of Social Security, is that during your working years you'll pay in so you can draw out money when you retire. ....

From Louis Menand's New Yorker article on "why we have college":

The big enchilada of public higher education, the State of California, has ten university campuses, twenty-three state-college campuses, a hundred and twelve community-college campuses, and more than 3.3 million students. Six per cent of the American population is currently enrolled in college or graduate school. In Great Britain and France, the figure is about three per cent.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a post up at Ricochet.com reporting on, and disagreeing with, Judge James C. Cacheris's decision in U.S. v. Danielczyk. Judge Cacheris is using the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which said Congress couldn't constitutionally ban corporations from engaging in electioneering communications, to strike down laws banning corporations from making direct contributions to political campaigns. Professor Epstein writes, "The exponential risks of bribery seem pretty large."

Professor Epstein also has a piece up at the Hoover Institution casting a skeptical eye on "Cass Sunstein's Regulatory Fiddling."

"2nd Banker in Hotel Sex Bust" is the headline over a New York Post article about the arrest of a 74-year-old Egyptian for allegedly assaulting a maid at the Pierre. The first "banker" was Dominique Strauss-Kahn; Bob McTeer writes that Mr. Strauss-Kahn is "not a banker." The Egyptian reportedly now runs a salt company and used to be the chairman of a bank. It seems like "banker" has become a general-purpose synonym for "bad guy," and whenever anyone even tangentially related to the financial industry is caught or accused of doing something bad, that relation to the financial industry immediately becomes the most salient fact about the individual for headline purposes. This is such a strong tendency that it outweighs even xenophobia; the headline wasn't "2nd Foreigner in Hotel Sex Bust," but "2nd Banker..."

Under the headline "The Good Banker," New York Times columnist Joe Nocera writes about Robert G. Wilmers of M&T Bank:

When he took it over, M&T had $2 billion in assets; today, its assets exceed $68 billion, and it's one of the most highly regarded regional bank holding companies. It has also been one of the best performing stocks in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index; indeed, M&T was one of only two banks in the S.& P. 500 that didn't cut its dividend during the financial crisis.

My column a couple of weeks ago predicted that the word "speculators" would be heard a lot between now and the 2012 election. Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats, fits the prediction: "To my mind, there is no question, that the same people on Wall Street, who caused this recession in the first place, which has been so devastating to the American people, are at it again, in terms of speculation in oil futures, driving up the price of oil very substantially." YouTube video of Mr. Sanders here and embedded below:

Joseph Nocera, writing in the New York Times: "There are also parts of the Ryan plan that deserve serious consideration, like means-testing — that is, forcing the elderly wealthy to pay more for health care than everyone else."

I told you this was heading in a dangerous direction.

Michael Barone has a column on the Texas Boom, pointing out that "in the ten years between April 2001 and April 2011," Texas gained 732,800 private sector jobs, while the nation overall lost 2 million. More: "In 1970 New York had 18 million people. In 2010 New York had 19 million people. In 1970 Texas had 11 million people. In 2010 Texas had 25 million people. Don't tell me public policy doesn't account for much of the difference." If Rick Perry runs for president, these are the sort of numbers we'll all be hearing a lot more of.

Bloomberg News has a profile of Alice Handy, whose firm, Investure LLC, manages money for Smith, Barnard, Trinity, and Middlebury Colleges, as well as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and a few other non-profits. The article includes this sentence: "A trim woman who wears her hair short, she hits the road in sensible shoes and understated jewelry." When was the last time you saw a Bloomberg profile of a male money manager that mentioned his shoes or his hair? If her footwear or hair were extraordinary they might be worth mentioning, but otherwise, what's the justification?

David Brooks, who comes in for a lot of criticism around here, makes an excellent point in his latest column: "This week, Senate Democrats voted on four separate budget proposals and not a single Democrat voted for a single one. Even President Obama's budget received zero votes. The Democrats don't want to be on record for any governing choice that might be painful."

Harvard University yesterday announced three new members to its governing Corporation, the small, secretive, and important self-perpetuating group that runs what the press release describes as "the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere." The one of the three that caught my eye was Joseph J. O'Donnell. There's a transcript of an interview that Harvard Business School's Amy Blitz did with him in June 2001 for its entrepreneurs program that is wonderful in the way it captures the entrepreneurial spirit of a guy who started and ran a concessions company (food service at ski areas, movie theaters, convention centers) with 11,000 employees in 40 states that "makes about a billion dollars a year." [It's not clear from the interview if that is gross revenue or net profit.] Highlights:

Mickey Kaus gets the better of David Leonhardt.

This struck me yesterday when I posted Paul Ryan's latest YouTube video, and I almost commented on it then, but now that Congressman Ryan has turned the transcript of the video into an op-ed for Bloomberg News, it's worth mentioning. Here's the sentence from the Bloomberg piece: "We also ensure that lower-income seniors and those with more health risks will receive greater support, while healthy seniors with more resources receive less." Yes, I know there's some of this already in Medicare, but the point is similar to Timothy Pawlenty's means-test for Social Security. The Democrats want to raise taxes on the rich, while the Republicans want to have reduced benefits for the rich. There doesn't seem to be any political party out there making the case for treating all Americans the same regardless of how much money they make, or trying to unite the country rather than finding one group to soak for the benefit of everyone else.

A cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Rita Redberg, has a pretty provocative op-ed in the New York Times saying Medicare could save between $75 billion and $150 billion a year simply by stopping paying for procedures that have no known medical benefit. She names cardiac stents, certain back surgeries, screening colonoscopies, and screenings for prostate and cervical cancer as among the procedures that Medicare should in certain cases stop paying for.