Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has thoughts on President Obama's handling of the Defense of Marriage Act: "I have no desire whatsoever to defend DOMA as a matter of federal policy and would surely urge the Congress to repeal it....This action therefore could lead to a constitutional crisis of some significance. It would have been so much wiser to stay out of choppy waters by working first for a repeal of the statute. But who can expect that level of prudence from this administration?"

From the latest wire from David Malpass of Encima Global and Grow Pac : "Washington DC area payrolls have grown 3.2% in the last year. That's the fastest rate since the Clinton boom and almost triple the 1.2% growth in nationwide private sector payrolls....Similarly, Washington's residential and commercial real estate are substantially outperforming the national average. In the most recent Case-Shiller index, home prices showed a 4.0% increase in prices year-over-year versus a 2.4% decline for the 20-city average."

Aaron Rodriguez at the Wisconsin-based blog The Hispanic Conservative has the back story of Scott Walker's relations with public employee unions during his time as county executive. Worth a read for anyone wondering how this all started.

What a circus in Wisconsin as the Republican assembly passed Governor Walker's bill limiting collective bargaining for government employees. YouTube (via Gateway Pundit) has video:

At his press conference the other day, President Obama painted a dire picture of what happens in a government shutdown brought about by a failure of Congress and the president to agree on funding the government's operations:

I think people should be careful about being too loose in terms of talking about a government shutdown, because this has -- this is not an abstraction. People don't get their Social Security checks. They don't get their veterans payments. Basic functions shut down.

The Associated Press now has a news article that says the opposite, without pointing out that it contradicts the president's claim:

WASHINGTON – Social Security checks would still go out. Troops would remain at their posts. Furloughed federal workers probably would get paid, though not until later. And virtually every essential government agency, like the FBI, the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard, would remain open.

George Soros has hired Cathy Zoi, who was President Obama's Acting Under Secretary for Energy and Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, to run a fund investing in green energy. More private sector job creation!

Timothy Carney has details, as does John Carney.

The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto today comments on the NPR report on the Southern Poverty Law Center report. We posted on the topic here yesterday. This happens a lot with FutureOfCapitalism and the Wall Street Journal.

President Obama has named a bunch of new members to his President's Council on Jobs and Competiveness, chaired by Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric. We will be tracking the performance of the publicly traded companies they represent as part of the FutureOfCapitalism Crony Capitalist Index.

Among the new players: Robert Wolf of UBS, Matt Rose of Warren Buffett-Berkshire Hathaway's Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad (high speed rail!), Brian Roberts of Comcast, Antonio Perez of Kodak, Richard Parsons of Citigroup, Paul Otellini of Intel, Ellen Kullman of DuPont, Gary Kelly of Southwest Airlines, and Kenneth Chenault of American Express.

The most emailed story this morning at Yahoo! News is a piece picking up some charts from Mother Jones about income inequality. The article claims that "over the last 30 years, the gap between rich and poor has widened into a chasm." The article has 27,000 Facebook likes.

The article falls into all the usual traps — failing to distinguish between income and assets or between income and consumption, failing to realize that people travel between different income quintiles over their lifetimes and that families do so over generations, failing to include government transfers such as food stamps or the value of Medicaid in the definition of income. For a more detailed analysis of this issue it's hard to beat the Diana Furchtgott-Roth column cited here.

The New York Times has two editorials today related to consumer protection. The first faults House Republicans for cutting $3 million from legislation that had been designated for a "database where consumers could report product hazards and the public could check products before buying them." The Times goes on, "there is a lot of lead out there. Since the new law has passed, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued 26 recalls because of lead paint in toys."

The executive director of the George W. Bush Institute, James Glassman, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal mentioning some policies he says could help get America to a 4% annual growth rate, among them "freer trade" and "Encouraging substantially more immigration by skilled workers."

Covering New York, I tended to think the state police details devoted to protecting the governor could be somewhat on the excessive side. But in Wisconsin, it looks like Scott Walker has some personal security issues that are worth taking seriously, at least to judge by this chilling YouTube video of people wishing him dead on Twitter.

So much for the new civility.

National Public Radio falls unskeptically for a Southern Poverty Law Center report claiming that the number of "hate groups" in America is higher than ever. Never mind that what really constitutes a threat from hate groups is not how many of them there are but how many people are actively participating in them and how many acts of criminal violence they commit. I could not find a listing by name of the groups on the Southern Poverty Law Center Web site, and the "report" the NPR Web site links to has a distinct political tilt:

Joseph Flom, a name partner in the law firm Skadden, Arps , Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, died this morning, the firm announced.

Tomorrow's papers will be full of tributes to the giant of mergers and acquisitions law who built Skadden into one of the world's largest law firms.

My favorite facts about Mr. Flom, though, are those recounted by Lincoln Caplan in his book Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire. Though Mr. Flom was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and 15th or 16th in a class of 325 at Harvard Law School, "toward the end of his last year he had not found a job." He ended up being the first associate hired by four partners at Skadden. Mr. Caplan goes on:

Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times:

The smart thing for us to do right now is to impose a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax, to be phased in at 5 cents a month beginning in 2012, with all the money going to pay down the deficit. .... With one little gasoline tax, we can make ourselves more economically and strategically secure, help sell more Chevy Volts and free ourselves to openly push for democratic values in the Middle East without worrying anymore that it will harm our oil interests.