The Wall Street Journal has what it says are details of "a tense meeting in Washington" on May 10 between representatives of SAC Capital Advisors LP and aides to Senator Grassley, who is investigating "suspicious trading" by Steven A. Cohen's hedge fund. The Journal cites anonymous sources "familiar with the meeting" in saying that the SAC representatives "suggested...that investigators should go easy on the firm and Mr. Cohen in their investigation...The people said that an SAC managing director, Michael C. Sullivan, a former staffer for ex-Sen. John Ensign, also cited Mr. Cohen's civic-minded interest in considering purchasing a stake in the New York Mets."

If this is true, it's really something, on several levels. First, there's the idea that Mr. Cohen should get civic-mindedness credit not for actually purchasing a stake in the Mets, which he hasn't actually done, but for simply considering purchasing a stake in the Mets.

Behind the "Bloomberg Government" paywall is a story about the Western Coal Traffic League's effort to prevent Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway from building the premium cost of its acquisition of the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad into BNSF's government-approved shipping rates. Not behind any paywall, though, is the Western Coal Traffic League's actual filing with the Surface Transportation Board, which tells the story from its perspective. That filing references a letter from Senator Thune: "I have discrete concems regarding the acquisition premium paid by Berkshire to BNSF shareholders, and the potential it could indirectiy influence rail rates for a number of shippers...Westem Fuels and Basin Electric should not be subject to higher rates than they would have been in the absence ofthe BNSF acquisition by Berkshire."

Money manager Clifford Asness writes, given President Obama's sudden front-page fixation on rolling Israel's borders back to the pre-1967 lines that Abba Eban called the "Auschwitz" borders: "In the spirit of inherently 'reasonable' historical precedent, and given the current situation is 'unsustainable', we propose rolling back the giant ever-growing socialistic regulatory liberty-crushing nanny state to its pre-1967 borders."

I love it. For comparison's sake, federal outlays in 1967 were $157.5 billion, compared to today's roughly $3.8 trillion, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget. Even using the OMB's "constant" inflation-adjusted 2005 dollars, federal outlays in 1967 were less than a third of what they are now.

This reminds me of my point about President Obama wanting to go back to the Clinton tax rates, but not to the Clinton spending levels. It's selective nostalgia.

Read it here first. The Associated Press has now picked up the story we posted here back on May 11 about the compensation of government beach lifeguards in California. The wire service reports that the $210,000-a-year lifeguards are fighting back with justifications of their compensation:

Those whose salaries are in question point out that they hold management roles, have decades of service and are considered public safety employees under the fire department, the same as fire captains and battalion chiefs. The fulltime guards train more than 200 seasonal lifeguards who make between $16 and $22 an hour, run a junior lifeguard program that brings in $1 million a year and oversee safety on nearly seven miles of sand.

"Scapegoating Speculators" is the headline of a column I have written that appears online at the New York Sun. It begins:

Here's a word you can expect to hear quite a bit between now and the 2012 election: speculators.

The way President Obama has been using the word recently, it means, "the guys — not me! — who made your gas prices go up."

The chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, Charles Koch, has an op-ed in the Wichita Eagle: "economic freedom is essential for improving the well-being of society as a whole, especially those who work hard to provide for their families, as well as our most vulnerable. History and sound theory are clear on this point. If we allow our government to waste scarce resources and become the ultimate decision maker, almost everyone will suffer a lower standard of living....Our government made a point of reforming its welfare policies for individuals but not for corporations. Cap-and-trade proposals, the health care bill, federal bailouts and "green" subsidies all favor a few businesses (usually large ones) at the expense of consumers, taxpayers and most other companies."

"Whatever the man did, do not forsake his ideas: they are more important" is the subheadline of the Economist magazine's take on the fall of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. As argument, the magazine offers this:

Whatever his personal failings, Mr Strauss-Kahn was an outstanding head of the IMF. Before the financial crisis, the fund risked irrelevance. With him there, it has again played a central part in managing the world economy.

The barely unstated assumption here is that the "world economy" needs to be, or can be, managed. Wouldn't it be better if the IMF were irrelevant? And if it became more relevant recently, is that because of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, or because of the financial crisis? I searched the piece in vain for an example of what DSK's ideas are that are supposedly so important. The only one I could detect was the idea that the French socialist party should be slightly less socialist, which isn't a bad idea, I suppose, but I'm not sure it quite justifies the vehement tone of the Economist subheadline.

"Bleeding Retailer Scrambles Ahead of Make-or-Break Holiday Season," is part of the sub-headline on an article in today's Wall Street Journal about Gap, Inc. The article is accompanied by a graphic showing declining sales at Gap. If you made the graphic about corporate net income rather than sales at one division, though, here's what it would show:

2006 $778 million

2007 $833 million

2008 $967 million

2009 $1.102 billion

2010 $1.204 billion

I'd like to be "bleeding" like that!

The Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, has an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, picked up by Yahoo! News:

The ink wasn't even dry on the proposal when the wailing began. You might be excused for thinking the safety net was being dismantled. One Democratic senator wondered aloud whether the bill would prompt the widespread auctioning of abandoned children into slavery. A senior Democrat in the House of Representatives warned that within two years of enactment, the bill would "put 1.5 million to 2.5 million children into poverty."

You remember those criticisms ... you heard them last month when the House of Representatives passed its fiscal year 2012 budget resolution, right?

Actually, they were all spoken 15 years ago, on the eve of the historic passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act.

ObamaCare waivers are emerging as a campaign issue, if this video from Crossroads GPS (link via Mike Allen's Politico Playbook) is any indication.

Buzz is building over the presidential prospects of Texas Governor Rick Perry now that Mike Huckabee is out of the race, Mitt Romney has irreconcilable differences with the Wall Street Journal over health care, and Newt Gingrich has alienated Paul Ryan fans, which is basically the entire Republican Party. For those who missed it when it originally appeared, or those who just want another read of it, here is the review we ran here back in November of Mr. Perry's book.

Alan Blinder — the Wall Street Journal identifies him as "a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University" and "a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve," but doesn't mention that he's senior adviser at Promontory Financial Group — has a piece in the Journal warning:

At some point, Mr. Geithner could wind up brooding over horrible questions like these: Do we stop issuing checks for Social Security benefits, or for soldiers' pay, or for interest payments to the Chinese government? Such agonizing choices are what make default imaginable.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this one doesn't seem as horrible or agonizing as Professor Blinder says it is: if the choice is between paying the Chinese government or American soldiers and retirees, pay the Americans before the Chinese.

"Will the Federal Reserve's Asset Purchases Lead to Higher Inflation?" is the headline of a post on the new-ish blog of the New York Fed. Not necessarily, is the answer given.

Cornel West, who is the Class of 1943 university professor at Princeton, calls President Obama "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats."

The Boston Globe reports: "West also recounts personal slights by Obama — that his phone calls didn't get returned, and that he couldn't get a ticket with his mother and brother to the inauguration."

As Professor West puts it: "brother Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of even courtesy."

The Washington Post has an interview with the former chairman of the executive committee of Citigroup, Robert Rubin, who also served as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. The Post asks: "Do you think we should have a debt ceiling at all?" Mr. Rubin replies, "No, it's an anachronism."

The natural follow-up would have been to ask Mr. Rubin whether he feels that Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, granting to Congress (not the executive branch) the power "To borrow money on the credit of the United States," is also an anachronism, and if so, whether he favors its amendment.