From President Obama's remarks yesterday at a Univision Town Hall:

starting in 2014 -- so right about when you guys are -- some of you are starting college, in some cases some of you will be right in the middle of college -- we're going to institute a program whereby your loans repayments will not have to exceed more than 10 percent of your income.

Now, this is something very important for all of you, because -- (applause) -- I speak from experience. Michelle and I, we didn't come from wealthy families. So we came from families a lot like yours, and we had to take out all these student loans to go to college and law school. By the time we were out, we had, I think between us, $120,000 worth of debt. It took us 10 years to pay it off. And we were lucky because we both got law degrees; we could make enough money to pay that debt.

From a press release issued by the law firm Kirkland & Ellis:

Kirkland & Ellis LLP is pleased to announce a significant expansion of its already strong antitrust practice with the addition of former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Tim Muris and his FTC Chief of Staff Christine Wilson to the Firm's Washington, D.C., office. Muris is the only former FTC chairman with an active private practice.

Muris and Wilson join Kirkland from the Washington, D.C., office of O'Melveny & Myers, LLP, where Muris co-chaired the antitrust practice and Wilson was a partner. Bilal Sayyed, formerly at O'Melveny & Myers, LLP and the FTC, and Ian Conner, formerly at Hunton & Williams LLP and the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), will also join Kirkland with Muris and Wilson....

The Economist's Will Wilkinson writes, "Though I've happily moved on, both occupationally and ideologically, I've spent most of my professional life in libertarian institutions founded or supported by the Kochs."

He goes on:

money is not all that easily translated into effective political influence. Most rich people just thoughtlessly fling cash at causes and candidates they happen to like to little real effect. Indeed, a good deal of political spending is part of moneyed status-signaling games; whether the money makes a difference to anything but the donor's reputation is beside the point. In any case, much effort is devoted simply to neutralising the spending of opposed ideological teams, and the whole racket largely amounts to redistribution from the rich to somewhat less rich political consultants and nonprofit managers.

Students should take fewer "boring" standardized tests, President Obama said today, according to a report of his remarks by the Associated Press, which quotes him as saying:

One thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching the test because then you're not learning about the world, you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math," the president said. "All you're learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test and that's not going to make education interesting."

"And young people do well in stuff that they're interested in," Obama said. "They're not going to do as well if it's boring."

The April 4 Time magazine has a piece marking the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, in which 146 died. "The garment workers won safer factories and shorter hours," the piece claims, crediting in part a 1909 strike by "more than 20,000 shirtwaist workers" and, the following year, "an even larger strike by the men of the cloakmakers' union."

My former New York Sun colleague Ben Smith has an interesting dispatch about Media Matters, a non-profit group that claims to be spending more than $10 million a year and to have 90 employees devoted largely to a campaign against the Fox News channel. There's a reference to a $1 million gift to the group from George Soros, but I wish Mr. Smith had gone a little further into probing the funding of Media Matters.

The group's most recent IRS Form 990, for example, filed in November 2010, lists as a director Rachel Pritzker Hunter. Campaign finance records show a Rachel Hunter, while identifying her occupation as "not employed/homemaker," gave $1 million to a pro-Obama political group in Ohio in advance of the 2008 election.

When even the liberal New Yorker magazine is complaining and making jokes about the tax charges on monthly cable television bills, you know it's a problem. From a humor piece in the April 4 issue of the magazine, headlined, "Explaining Your Time Warner Bill":

$17.23 — Basic service

$37.35 — Standard service

$40.81 — Actual service

$12.50 — Federal taxes

$11.75 — Federal taxes, part two

$6.85 — New York City taxes

$5.35 — Fort Wayne, Indiana, city taxes

The Washington Post has a pretty good editorial on President Obama's position favoring offshore oil drilling — in Brazil, but not here: "WHEN WAS the last time an American president stood before an audience in a foreign country and announced that he looked forward to importing more of its oil? Answer: Just over a week ago, when President Obama joined political and business leaders in Brasilia in hailing the fact that their newly discovered offshore petroleum reserves might be twice as large as those in the United States."

Gordon Crovitz is almost certainly right that we don't need more laws or government regulations on Internet privacy, especially related to advertising, but his column today arguing that point is humorous (I think unintentionally so, but Mr. Crovitz is so smart and has such a good sense of humor that you never know) on two fronts.

Start with the question in the column: "If most Americans are happy to have Facebook accounts, knowingly trading personal information for other benefits, why is Washington so focused on new privacy laws?" Gee, there is a real stumper. Might it possibly have anything to do with the fact that the largest-circulation newspaper in the country — the same one in which Mr. Crovitz's column appears — has been running a 15-part series campaigning on the topic?

Then comes this:

American corporations moving business overseas to avoid America's high corporate tax rates was the topic of a thirteen-and-a-half minute story by Leslie Stahl on CBS News' "60 Minutes" show Sunday.

Whether by coincidence or by some concerted effort by a pressure group, the article featured two of the same sources that the New York Times relied on for its article last week on how General Electric isn't paying much U.S. corporate tax: a Democratic congressman, Lloyd Doggett, and an economist who writes for a non-profit organization, Martin Sullivan.

The New York Times has been on quite a tear lately exposing special tax deals for influential businesses. There was the story on how GE has had no net federal tax liability, then another on how BlackRock is trying to save millions by being taxed by New York as a general business rather than a bank, then another on how Twitter is going to get a special payroll tax break to stay in San Francisco.

This case of the lone air traffic controller falling asleep during the overnight shift at Reagan National Airport near Washington, D.C. is a perfect example of how the size and cost of government grow. The transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, a Republican, has responded by directing, as the New York Times reports it, "that a second controller be on duty during the overnight shift at the Washington airport."

The New York Times has a long front-page news article calling for General Electric to pay more taxes. Regular readers of the coverage here of both General Electric and taxes know that I am critical of General Electric's efforts to use its political clout for special subsidies and that as a general matter I favor a tax code with simple low rates (or even a single flat rate) that treats everyone the same rather than favoring certain companies or groups or behaviors.

The Times does a pretty good job of explaining how GE achieves its low tax rate using outside lobbyists and an in-house 975-person (!) tax department that "includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress."

Bloomberg News columnist Roger Lowenstein writes, in a column bemoaning "excessive" executive pay: "one of the biggest threats to American democracy is inequality. ...And when executives earn more in a half day than teachers do in a year, talented people don't pursue careers in education."

This is just demonstrably false. Plenty of talented people are pursuing careers in education, notwithstanding the compensation gap between teaching and being a corporate executive. Teach for America, for example, got 46,000 applications for 4,500 spots. Many of the applicants come from Ivy League colleges. The handful of tenure-track jobs in the humanities "are being pursued by thousands of qualified people," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

"Hundreds of Jordanians Set Up Protest in Capital," is the headline over an Associated Press news article from Amman. It begins, "Hundreds of Jordanians set up a protest camp in a main square in the capital on Thursday to press demands for the ouster of the prime minister and wider public freedoms." It goes on, "Jordan's opposition also want to strip the king of some of his powers, specifically in appointing the prime minister. Instead, they want the premier to be elected by a popular vote."

You might think this would be the sort of thing that Columbia University, whose Middle East Research Center is based in Amman, would have an interest in weighing in on. Yet the center describes itself as "under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah," the king's wife. "Under the patronage" is a polite way of saying what a list of all Columbia foreign grants, gifts, and contracts for $100,000 or more for the academic year 2009-2010, obtained by FutureOfCapitalism.com from the New York State Department of Education discloses more specifically — that Columbia received $646,740.87 from "Her Majesty Queen Rania Al-Abdullah," another $590,784 from the queen's teacher's academy, and another $1,376,485.74 from the Kingdom of Jordan and its scientific research fund.