The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are "beginning to examine whether Apple's new media subscription service violates antitrust laws," Bloomberg News reports.

Paul Krugman writes in his New York Times column:

House Republicans, in particular, are literally stealing food from the mouths of babes — nutritional aid to pregnant women and very young children is one of the items on their cutting block — so they can pose, falsely, as deficit hawks.

He's echoing President Obama, who highlighted the issue in a press conference this week, accusing Republicans of "cutting infant formula to poor kids."

The New York Times discovers doubts about "the safety, financial soundness and long-term viability" of the Chinese high-speed rail system that President Obama "hailed" in his State of the Union address.

Is it just me, or does NPR's coverage of some free-market-oriented health care ideas cross over the line from healthy reportorial skepticism into reflexive hostility? At least they are covering the ideas, which is more than can be said for a lot of other outlets.

The Obama administration's housing department is asking lobbyists to sign nondisclosure agreements as a condition of participating in meetings, Politico reports:

"How can they go around and pat themselves on the back as the most transparent administration in history and then turn around and ask lobbyists to sign nondisclosure agreements to keep their meetings secret," said a lobbyist whose organization was at the Feb. 4 meeting. "It's like extortion. We're not going to be able to do our jobs unless we have secret meetings with them."

Link via the Heritage Foundation's Morning Bell.

Another example of the regulatory revolving door comes from today's Wall Street Journal, in an article headlined, "What J.P. Morgan Knew About Madoff":

But on Tuesday, the bank's general counsel Stephen Cutler stood before a group of analysts and said J.P. Morgan "did not know about or in any way participate in the fraud" and vowed not to litigate the case in the media. Mr. Dimon then took the microphone and said: "You can imagine what I would say."

The Journal, alas, doesn't mention it, but this is the same Stephen Cutler who, until 2005, "was Director of the US Securities and Exchange Commission's Division of Enforcement. During his six-year tenure at the SEC, Mr. Cutler oversaw 1,100 employees and led the agency's investigations of numerous financial reporting matters, as well as its actions involving exchange specialists, research analysts and mutual funds."

Israel's GDP grew at an annualized rate of 7.8% in the fourth quarter of 2010, the country's central bureau of statistics reported yesterday.

The Israeli business newspaper Globes has an article quoting the Israeli finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, attributing the robust gains to, among other things, an earned-income tax credit and "a network of railways and highways to the periphery." Globes columnist Avi Temkin, meanwhile, warns of inflation and a housing bubble.

It sure would be nice to get a quarter of 7.8% growth here in America, though I'm skeptical that it's going to be government-backed high-speed rail that is going to get us there.

It looks as though the close alliance between GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt and President Obama wasn't enough to preserve the $3 billion in taxpayer spending that GE, together with Rolls Royce, was expected to reap from the backup military jet engine project that the House of Representatives voted yesterday to kill.

"China's Oligarchs Tighten Grip, With Assist From Goldman" is the headline over the Bloomberg News review of what looks, to judge by the review, like a pretty interesting book: Red Capitalism: The Fragile Foundation of China's Extraordinary Rise by Carl E. Walter and Fraser J.T. Howie.

My favorite parts of the New York Times's jailhouse interview (The banks "had to know") with Bernard Madoff were these:

Both the interview and the e-mail correspondence were conducted as part of this reporter's research for a coming book on the Madoff scandal, "The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust," for publication this spring by Times Books, a division of Henry Holt & Company.

And:

Mr. Madoff's claims must be weighed against his tenuous credibility. After deceiving federal regulators and supposedly sophisticated investors for at least 16 years, he would certainly be branded as a liar by defense lawyers if he appeared as a witness against any defendant in a courtroom — a fact he acknowledged somewhat ruefully during the interview on Tuesday.

In his new budget, President Obama, who as recently as Superbowl Sunday bragged, inaccurately, "I didn't raise taxes once," proposes, among others, the following tax increases:

The Democratic governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton, is proposing raising the state's top income tax rate to 13.95% for two years on income above $500,000, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The Democratic governor of Connecticut, Dannel Malloy, is proposing $1.5 billion in tax increases, including raising the retail sales tax to 6.35% from 6% while increasing the base of items that are subject to the tax. He also "has proposed eight income tax rates, ranging from 3 percent for joint filers earning up to $20,000 a year to 6.7 percent for joint filers earning $1 million," the Hartford Business Journal reports. The tax increases would be retroactive to January 1, according to the Journal, which doesn't mention the federal constitutional prohibition on ex post facto law. The Tax Foundation indicates that Connecticut now has three income tax brackets, topping out at 6.5%.

The president, asked what advice he'd give to protesters in the Middle East, said this:

The history of successful transitions to democracy have generally been ones in which peaceful protests led to dialogue, led to discussion, led to reform, and ultimately led to democracy.

And that's true in countries like Eastern Europe. That was also true in countries like Indonesia, a majority Muslim country that went through some of these similar transitions but didn't end up doing it in such a chaotic fashion that it ended up dividing the societies fundamentally.

President Obama, even without a teleprompter, can actually talk for quite some time in a way that makes him sound reasonable and appealing — until a listener starts thinking carefully about what he's saying, or until he veers off course. In his press conference this morning, for example, he spoke of his desire to work in "a genuine spirit of compromise" on deficit and debt reduction, and of his desire to "keep taxes as simple as possible and as low as possible."

Then all of a sudden he was accusing the Republicans of wanting to maintain "tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires" while "cutting infant formula to poor kids." How does the "genuine spirit of compromise" include accusing your political opponents of trying to starve poor infants to death so the proceeds can be used for tax breaks for billionaires? What is he talking about?