The Republican Study Committee, a group of conservatives in Congress, has released this YouTube video to promote the Welfare Reform Act of 2011, which, among other things, would impose a work requirement on food stamp recipients. I find the voice of the narrator in the YouTube video a bit distracting, but others may react differently to it.

"Sen. Claire McCaskill admits owing $287K in taxes on private plane," is the headline over a news article in the Hill newspaper about a Democrat from Missouri.

"There is no bill that comes," she explained.

When we mentioned that people were responding to the closure of bookstores by suggesting a government-backed "neighborhood bookstore development bank," we thought it was just a proposal. But it turns out a government bookstore subsidy has already been tried and, not surprisingly, failed.

The Whittier (Calif.) Daily News brings word that taxpayers in Pico Rivera, Calif. had spent $1.6 million in federal grant money to bring a Borders bookstore to the city under a 2002 agreement, and that the city had been subsidizing the store's rent to the tune of about $10,833.33 a month since it opened in 2003. Now that the store is to be closed in the Borders bankruptcy, the town is wondering if it still has to pay the monthly rent.

The New York Times's 2011 proxy statement is out, and as usual it is good for some laughs.

Back in 2002, after Enron, the New York Times editorialized against auditors performing consulting work for companies they audit. Said one editorial:

reports that four of the five major accounting firms, including Arthur Andersen, may be moving away from offering certain consulting and internal audit services to the companies they audit is a welcome development. For too long the profession has failed to acknowledge the conflict of interest inherent in auditing a company's books while trying to sell it other services.

Gordon Crovitz has a column in the Wall Street Journal about F.A. Hayek, Japan, and "The Pretence of Knowledge": "at least some physical systems turn out to be so complex that they resemble unpredictable social sciences more than the certainties of simpler physical science."

Michael Walzer and Philip Gourevitch both have skeptical pieces newly out about President Obama's bombing of Libya. Mr. Gourevitch's article is in the New Yorker, Mr. Walzer's article is in The New Republic. Mr. Gourevitch observes that one of the leaders of the rebellion in Libya "is a man who served, until a few weeks ago, as Qaddafi's own Minister of Justice" and asks, "speaking of democracy, what about American public opinion? What about Congress? Is the Security Council the only place where this should be deliberated? What about some attempt by our Commander-in-Chief to advise and seek the consent of the electorate before we march into battle overseas?"

The decision of a news reporter at the Washington Post to go to work for Vice President Biden as communications director is raising some eyebrows. Yahoo! News reports that the reporter "was still covering legislative battles and Biden's role up until a few weeks ago." A commenter at Politico suggests, "Her reporting on Biden was basically a 'job tryout.'"

Quote of the Day: "The New York Times paywall is like the French tax system: expensive, utterly complicated, disconnected from the reality and designed to be bypassed." — Frédéric Filloux, writing in the "Monday Note."

And this: "Loopholes abound....use three browsers as the cookies placed by the NYTimes on each are not interconnected; if you have Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari, that's 80 stories a month! The paywall is fading away."

The Wall Street Journal has a column trying to explain the $9.7 billion purchase of fuel additives company Lubrizol by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. From the Journal's explanation:

4. It has pricing power.

Mr. Buffett recently said "the single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you've got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you've got a very good business."

A senior economist and adviser in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Jason Saving, has a new "Economic Letter" out, issued by the Fed, warning that the cost savings promised by ObamaCare are illusory. He writes, "The law certainly will provide insurance for millions of currently uninsured Americans. However, it is unlikely to simultaneously 'bend the cost curve.'" He explains, in part:

Under the assumptions embedded in the CBO analysis, health care reform would modestly reduce government debt relative to what otherwise would have prevailed. However, several assumptions are unlikely to hold....

Stanford economist John B. Taylor writes:

the TARP established an unfortunate precedent of heavy-handed government intervention in the operations of businesses. The government forced some financial institutions to take TARP funds, even those that said they did not want them, by threatening actions from regulators. The government used the TARP for purposes other than originally stated in Congressional hearings, including the bailing out of automobile companies.

Link via Economic Policies for the 21st Century.

The New York Times's "Deal Professor," Steven Davidoff, is back with a follow-up column to the one I posted about here the other day concerning the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz's effort to get the SEC to make it harder for hedge funds to buy up 5% of more of companies. He raises the issue of "empty voting," which happens "when a person votes shares in which they do not have an economic interest."

This concern is probably overblown, but if it needs addressing (a big "if"), a better approach than tightening the rules on disclosing accumulated positions would be to crack down on naked shorting and to be more vigilant in recording share transfers and ownership. If shareholders don't want someone with no economic interest voting, then they shouldn't lend their shares out to short-sellers.

For sheer regulatory gall, it's hard to top the FDIC's lawsuit against Washington Mutual executives and their wives. This is a company, remember, that was seized and sold at a bargain price to JP Morgan Chase. As one of the executives being sued, Kerry Killinger, testified before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission:

The unfair treatment of Washington Mutual did not begin with its unnecessary seizure. In July 2008, Washington Mutual was excluded from the "do not short" list, which protected large Wall Street banks from abusive short selling. The Company was similarly excluded from hundreds of meetings and telephone calls between Wall Street executives and policy leaders that ultimately determined the winners and losers in this financial crisis. For those that were part of the inner circle and were "too clubby to fail," the benefits were obvious. For those outside of the club, the penalty was severe.

The New York Times thinks it's going to get people to pay "$15 every four weeks" — or $195 a year — for the privilege of reading more than 20 articles a calendar month at NYT.com, while simultaneously leaving people free to access an unlimited number of stories a month via Facebook and Twitter.

It looks to me like Facebook director Donald Graham just got a big win over his old rival over the International Herald Tribune Arthur Sulzberger Jr., because Mr. Sulzberger's move just made Facebook that more valuable. All you need is one Facebook friend who pays the $195 — or a group of 30 Facebook friends who each agree to use their 20-story-quota one day a month to post whatever is worth reading that day to Facebook — and your free Facebook account just became worth $195.

One of the best assessments I've seen of the practical impact of ObamaCare comes in this study from Lockton Companies LLC, an employee benefits consultant that aggregated the results of analyses the firm performed for 136 clients:

These companies that employ a large number of full-time, relatively low-paid hourly workers who do not have health coverage today, tell us they have but one option: eliminate large numbers of full-time positions. By making full-time employees part-time, the employees are removed from the penalty equation.

I was in a Citibank branch in New York City the other day and the place was plastered with flyers advertising for part-time tellers.