Of all the possible explanations for Barack Obama, one of the most intriguing is that, like Bill Clinton before him, he was both a law school graduate and a law school professor.

As such, Walter Olson explains in his new book, Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America, he was subjected to an environment of overwhelming leftism.

Democrats outnumber Republicans 28 to 1 on the Stanford law school faculty, 23 to 1 at Columbia, Mr. Olson reports.

Mr. Olson's book describes the various ways that law schools have shaped public policy. Clinics on the law school campuses get involved in political issues. He writes that Yale's Legislative Advocacy Clinic "attempts to move the state of Connecticut toward 'a more progressive agenda in taxing.'" CUNY law school, meanwhile, is "itself a unit of the same New York City government it regularly sues on welfare issues.

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The Wall Street Journal has a list of companies it suggests Warren Buffett should buy, including the payroll processing firm ADP: "market cap: $24.8 billion; gross margins, 51%."

If Congress and the states got rid of payroll taxes and withholdings and made individuals pay their own taxes quarterly or at year end, or replaced income taxes with a national retail sales tax or other consumption-based tax, that whole business would go away. I suppose you'd also have to make unemployment insurance optional or have it be individual-driven rather than employer driven. The government makes it pretty complicated for a business to pay the withheld taxes itself without going through a payroll company, and the payroll companies would certainly oppose the government taking steps to make it simpler for businesses to do this directly through a government Web site rather than through the payroll companies.

The Justice Department is investigating UPS and FedEx for "possible anticompetitive behavior in the parcel-delivery market," the Wall Street Journal reports. All four commenters at the Wall Street Journal site this morning make the same point I was about to (and one that's absent in the article): the same government that's investigating UPS and FedEx also owns their main competitor, the U.S. Postal Service, which, in terms of restrictions on competition and various government advantages (such as not having to pay taxes), is right up there.

David Brooks has a New York Times column complaining, in part, that Republicans are coddling senior citizens: "Seniors vote....seniors are being protected while children are getting pummeled....In Washington, the Republicans who designed the cuts for this fiscal year seemed to have done no serious policy evaluation. They excused the elderly and directed cuts at anything else they could easily reach."

I made a similar point here the other day in a post about the budget of Governor Chris Christie, Republican of New Jersey: "If there's pandering, it's to senior citizens..."

Mr. Brooks' column goes on: "Pell grant levels have surged in recent decades, but college completion rates have been flat. The administration would reform the Pell grant program, eliminating parts that don't work. More important, it would establish stronger incentives so colleges have an interest in getting kids to graduate, not simply attend."

The anti-Scott Walker crowd (or someone pretending to be them) seems to have taken down the Club for Growth Web site via a distributed denial of service attack. This is an act of thuggishness akin to throwing a rock through a plate-glass window or cutting the phone lines of an opposing political campaign's campaign headquarters, and under the U.S. Code it's arguably a federal crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison. In addition, you've got to wonder — what is it about the small government, free-market ideas the Club for Growth espouses that makes them so threatening to some people that, rather than debating them on the merits in a civilized fashion, they prefer to silence the ideas through a form of violent force?

"Poll Shows Support for Embattled Public Sector Workers" is the headline over the New York Times' news article about its own poll. If you actually read the poll, it says that 22% of those surveyed in the poll are either public sector workers or their household members. Back them out of the poll, and one could hang a different headline over it.

That's not the only way the poll is skewed. One question reads in part, "Some states are trying to take away some of the collective bargaining rights of public employee unions. Do you favor or oppose taking away some of the collective bargaining rights of these unions." This question measures how people feel about "taking away" "rights" — words repeated for emphasis — as much as or more than how they feel about collective bargaining for public employees. You'd expect people to be reflexively opposed to taking away rights.

Koch Industries chairman and CEO Charles Koch has an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal:

Government spending on business only aggravates the problem. Too many businesses have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations or tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay.

Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want.

President Obama spoke today to the National Governors Association and he was pretty much his usual self:

let me also say this: I don't think it does anybody any good when public employees are denigrated or vilified or their rights are infringed upon. We need to attract the best and the brightest to public service. These times demand it. We're not going to attract the best teachers for our kids, for example, if they only make a fraction of what other professionals make. We're not going to convince the bravest Americans to put their lives on the line as police officers or firefighters if we don't properly reward that bravery.

Libya's sovereign wealth fund, the Libyan Investment Authority, owns a little more than 3% of Pearson, which owns the Financial Times, Penguin publishers, and half of the Economist. The Guardian reports that lawyers for Pearson are looking into the matter, and it quotes Pearson's chief executive, Marjorie Scardino:

"It is abhorrent to us what is happening in Libya and we have made it clear we are uncomfortable with the holding," said Marjorie Scardino, chief executive of Pearson. "We are in a terrible position, it is abhorrent for everyone at Pearson. We do not know what the freeze notice covers at this point."...

"We did meet with one of their financial representatives, a European – he was a middleman, not really a representative of the authority," Scardino said. "We are a public company in a free market and we don't choose our shareholders they choose us. The basic premise is, this is one of those glitches in the free market system. Unfortunately we can't tell a shareholder to get off our register."

Southwest airlines CEO Gary Kelly, newly appointed by President Obama to the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, wants federal approval for Southwest's merger with AirTran, USA Today reports. The chairman of the council, GE's Jeffrey Immelt, already got federal antitrust approval for his sale of NBC-Universal to Comcast.

I'm not suggesting that these approvals should have been withheld. But the antitrust enforcement specter makes it a little less likely that a CEO with a pending deal would turn down an invitation from the president to serve on this council. And it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in impartial antitrust enforcement when the CEOs whose deals are up for approval are parading around with the president.

An IBM manager's $363,053 federal estate tax bill on the death in 2009 of her spouse, a clinical psychologist, is what triggered President Obama's decision to disavow the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional, Bloomberg News reports. The Bloomberg article doesn't get into the point, but it's interesting that Mr. Obama handled this one with the approach of getting rid of the Defense of Marriage Act rather than by getting rid of the estate tax, which would have been another way of addressing the same problem going forward.

Mayor Bloomberg writes in a New York Times op-ed: "unions also play a vital role in protecting against abuses in the workplace, and in my experience they are integral to training, deploying and managing a professional work force."

Whatever experience Mr. Bloomberg is referring to, it isn't his experience at Bloomberg LP, the company that made him his fame and fortune. That's a non-union shop that has somehow managed to train, deploy, and manage a professional work force (or at least professional enough to make Mr. Bloomberg a billionaire many times over, notwithstanding our complaints here from time to time about its news coverage) without unions.

Michael Barone has some analysis of all that data purporting to show middle-class income stagnating:

My own assumption is that economic statistics have been painting an unduly bleak picture of modest-income America. When we measure real incomes we use inflation indexes, which over time inevitably overstate inflation, because they're based on static market baskets of goods.

The problem is if one item spikes in price, we quit buying it. In addition, inflation indexes cannot account for product innovation and quality increases.

Liberal writers look back to 1973 as a year when real wages supposedly peaked -- just before a nasty bout of inflation. But back then a pocket calculator cost $110. The smartphone you can buy today for $200 has a calculator and hundreds of other devices.

Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett is out this weekend with his annual letter to shareholders. While there's plenty of material to comment on, one passage, about the private jet business that Mr. Buffett describes as having been "Berkshire's only major business problem," struck me as particularly worth noting:

Dave has meanwhile maintained NetJets' industry-leading reputation for safety and service. In many important ways, our training and operational standards are considerably stronger than those required by the FAA. Maintaining top-of-the-line standards is the right thing to do, but I also have a selfish reason for championing this policy. My family and I have flown more than 5,000 hours on NetJets (that's equal to being airborne 24 hours a day for seven months) and will fly thousands of hours more in the future. We receive no special treatment and have used a random mix of at least 100 planes and 300 crews. Whichever the plane or crew, we always know we are flying with the best-trained pilots in private aviation.

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