The New York Post has a report on how Senator Bob Corker, a Republican of Tennessee, is joining with some other politicians to stall or block a provision to limit what banks can charge retailers as a fee when debit cards are used to pay for goods or services:

"Senator Corker doesn't believe the federal government should be telling private companies what they can charge for goods and services," said Laura Lefler Herzog, a spokeswoman for Corker.

A quick look at Senator Corker's Web site discloses at least three instances of Senator Corker doing pretty much what his spokeswoman claims he doesn't believe in.

An editorial in today's New York Times faults Republicans in the House of Representatives for cutting funding from President Obama's proposed budgets for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's food inspection service and the Food and Drug Administration's food safety programs. The editorial begins,

U.S.D.A. Inspection

PRESIDENT'S F.Y. 2010-11 REQUEST: $1.036 BILLION

HOUSE VOTED: $930 MILLION

F.D.A. Food Safety

PRESIDENT'S F.Y. 2010-11 REQUEST: $856 MILLION

HOUSE VOTED: $727 MILLION

Let's take the FDA first. What the Times editorial doesn't mention is that even at the House's reduced spend of $727 million a year, the FDA food safety budget would be a 17% increase over the FDA's 2008 food safety budget of $619.6 million. There isn't 17% more food in America to inspect than there was before President Obama took office.

It's ruined at the end by a call to raise taxes on the rich (or at least to keep rates the same by preventing the scheduled expiration of a tax increase), but the New York Times actually has a pretty sensible editorial about New York state government wages and benefits. Writes the Times, "It is also worth considering giving new employees the option to join what is known as a defined-contribution system, similar to the 401(k) plans widely in use in the private sector, and reducing the reliance on a guaranteed benefit system that has proved so ruinously expensive."

Newsbusters is unimpressed, faulting the Times for being critical of the Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, at the same time the paper is urging the governor of New York to take a harder line against New York's public employee unions.

A provocative essay by Rolf Dobelli appears under the title "Avoid News." It begins, "This article is the antidote to news."

The Wall Street Journal had some coverage of this last week but it's also worth a look at Rich Lowry's National Review column on Judge Gladys Kessler's pro-ObamaCare ruling:

It's the most self-undermining defense of the constitutionality of a dubious statute since then–solicitor general Elena Kagan told the Supreme Court that under campaign-finance reform, the government could ban certain pamphlets. Kessler, like Kagan before her, does everyone the favor of clarifying the issue.

Judge Kessler writes, "It is pure semantics to argue that an individual who makes a choice to forgo health insurance is not 'acting,' especially given the serious economic and health-related consequences to every individual of that choice. Making a choice is an affirmative action, whether one decides to do something or not do something."

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a review in Barron's of David Skeel's book, The New Financial Deal. Professor Epstein writes of the Financial Stability Oversight Council created by the Dodd-Frank financial "reform" law: "One stroke of the pen could reduce the largest bank in the nation to a ward of the state, without any judicial protection against administrative overreaching....Ironically, the greatest source of systemic risk today is the monolithic, state-created FSOC."

More: "There are, of course, individuals who make mistakes in credit management. But the same can be said of regulators, who frequently impose conditions that induce lenders to shun marginal borrowers, driving them into the hands of payday lenders, pawn shops and loan sharks that demand much stiffer terms."

Fox News reports:

A Connecticut town must provide their union workers free coffee and milk, according to a ruling from the State Board of Labor Relations. The board also ordered town leaders to reinstate "Dress Down Fridays" for the union clerical and custodial workers....

The board determined the town retaliated against the union members for comments they made at a finance meeting in 2009.

"Government Report Finds 92 Percent of Nursing Homes Employ Convicts," is the headline over an article at ProPublica, a non-profit online news organization.

The commenters on the site do a good job of correcting the article's mindlessness. "do you really want all those ex-cons unemployed?" one asks. Asks another, "don't people who have had convictions and 'served their time' have a right to employment?" Says a third: "People have records. That doesn't make them bad people. It makes them people who made a bad choice at some point in the past. And here's a big surprise for you, people without criminal records do bad things too. They just haven't been caught yet. Everyone has the capacity to do bad things. Some get caught, others don't. Others get a pass, depending on how much money you have at your disposal. For a supposedly Christian nation we don't seem to have very much belief in redemption."

The producers of the movie "Atlas Shrugged," based on the Ayn Rand novel, held a special preview screening in New York last night. I went and can report that the film was great.

What was wonderful? The portrayal of Washington was right on target. Lawmakers were proposing a bill to "make it illegal to fire employees from profitable corporations." Another piece of legislation, the "equalization of opportunity" bill, would make it illegal for anyone to own more than one company. The "coordinator of the bureau of economic planning and national resources," Wesley Mouch, intones disapprovingly, "Rich people are getting richer, poor people are getting poorer." The "state science institute" retards innovation by raising bogus safety concerns.

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Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore says:

we're not broke.

This country is not broke; state of Wisconsin is not broke.

There's a ton of cash in this country, trillions of dollars of it....What's happened is that we've allowed a vast majority of that cash to be concentrated in the hands of just a few people

...We've allowed them to take that.

That's not theirs, that's a national resource, that's ours.

Looks to me as though the guy has a flawed understanding of property rights. If any policymakers or politicians take him seriously, there's a potential for an awfully polarizing and damaging debate.

The Boston Globe has an update on how that universal health care coverage in Massachusetts is working out:

Governor Deval Patrick is not embracing the popular outrage over the $8.6 million in compensation given to Cleve L. Killingsworth, the former chief executive of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, who resigned abruptly last year....

Asked again about the appropriateness of Killingsworth's severance package in light of Blue Cross Blue Shield's status as a nonprofit heath insurer, Patrick shot back: "I got your question. That was my answer."

Killingsworth, a major Democratic donor, has given $5,000 to the Massachusetts Democratic Party and $1,500 to the governor's campaign fund.

Zachery Kouwe has posted a letter from Oaktree Capital's Howard Marks:

Why were the highly regulated banks ground zero for the consequences of the financial crisis, while unregulated hedge funds were relatively unscathed? I just can't imagine that regulators will ever have the ability to fully anticipate the consequences of change in the fast-developing financial system, or to foresee the development of new problems for which rules and responses have yet to be drawn up. Here's how Peter Sands, chief executive of Standard Chartered, was quoted in the Financial Times of January 27: "It is not clear why some regulators who were there before the crisis should believe they now have all the right solutions."

What regulator would have been able to make a difference in protecting our financial institutions (and the overall economy) from the developments of 2004-07? And given how valuable his skills would be in the private sector, how long would he have remained a regulator?

Zachary Karabell has a piece up at the Huffington Post making some points worth listening to about the Galleon-Gupta "insider trading" situation. among them:

In part, all of this is the fallout of a culture looking for villains for the financial crisis. As Charles Ferguson, director of the documentary Inside Job said in accepting his Academy Award, no financial executive has gone to jail for their role in the financial meltdown, and in his view, that is wrong. But is it? Generals routinely mess up during war, either from incompetence, vanity, arrogance or simply the unexpected. They are recalled and sacked, we hope, but unless it can be shown that they willfully and purposely screwed up, they are in our society rarely see a court-martial. Financial executives were culpable in myriad decisions that led to the financial crisis, but that in itself does not translate into prosecution and jail time.

On New York Times home page:
Headline: CUNY Is Swamped by Remedial Students
Headline underneath: Teachers Ask, Why the Scorn?