David Malpass has an op-ed piece in the Washington Times suggesting that Republicans use the debt-limit vote to bargain for "limits on the marketable national debt relative to gross domestic product and on federal spending relative to GDP." He writes, "Republicans should embrace the debt-ceiling opportunity with gusto. This is what fiscal conservatives live for - a public fight over excessive spending leading to revolutionary legislation that Senate Democrats can't filibuster and the president will have to sign."

I don't necessarily buy the idea that federal spending should be linked to GDP. We need the same 9 Supreme Court justices at roughly the same salaries no matter what the GDP is, and many other government expenses are fixed rather than varying according to GDP. On the politics of it, though, the idea that there should be some spending reductions in exchange for any increase in the debt limit seems to make sense.

Jonah Goldberg has a column about the press and the Tucson shootings:

Confirmation bias is a problem for all people and institutions of all ideological stripes, but in this instance it is synonymous with liberal media bias. Richard Nixon reportedly once said that it was obvious the world is overcrowded, because everywhere he went he saw huge crowds. Similarly, reporters "knew" beforehand that this must have been a right-wing nut, and so, like the drunk who only looks for his car keys where the light is good, they recognized only evidence that proved their theory.

More:

It's deeply reassuring (though no doubt dismaying to the Times, MSNBC and other outlets), that the American people didn't buy it. After three days of "discourse hysteria" a CBS poll released Tuesday found that 57% of Americans found the killing unrelated to the political discourse. By Friday a poll by Quinnipiac found that only 15% of Americans blamed the murder spree on "heated political rhetoric."

Judith Miller, identified as "an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor," has an op-ed piece in the New York Daily News calling on President Obama to enact stricter gun control laws following the Tucson shooting. She writes:

Aided and abetted by the Supreme Court, gun-loving Americans can now carry pistols on Amtrak trains and in national parks.

If Ms. Miller wants to mount a campaign to amend the Constitution and revise the Second Amendment, that's one thing. But until she does that, it's not really sporting to blame the justices for failing to rewrite the Constitution the way she wants. Once you start giving justices license to edit rights out of the Constitution on their own, it's a slippery slope.

More from Ms. Miller:

A little less than a year ago, the first lady of the United States, accompanied by Treasury Secretary Geithner, Agriculture Secretary Vilsack, and the Governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, stopped in North Philadelphia to visit a supermarket and talk about what she called "food deserts."

we saw this example today again during our visit to the Fresh Grocer at Progress Plaza. As you all know, the last supermarket that was in that community closed more than 10 years ago. More than a decade ago. That was the last time that that community had a grocery store. So this community went 10 years without a place for folks to buy good food. For 10 years folks had to buy their groceries at places like convenience stores and gas stations, where usually they don't have a whole lot of fresh food, if any, to choose from. So that means if a mom wanted to buy a head of lettuce to make a salad in this community, or have some fresh fruit for their kids' lunch, that means she would have to get on a bus, navigate public transportation with big bags of groceries, probably more than one time a week, or, worse yet, pay for a taxicab ride to get to some other supermarket in another community, just to feed her kids.

So let's think about that. For 10 years in one community, there were kids in that community who couldn't get the nutritious food that they needed during some of the most formative years of their lives. And think about the impact that that can have on a child's health, not just now but in the future, because research shows that children who are overweight as adolescents are 70 to 80 percent more likely to become obese as adults.

And what happened in the neighborhood that we visited today is happening somewhere in every state all across this country. Right now there are 23.5 million Americans, including 6.5 million children, who live in what we call "food deserts." These are places and communities that don't have a supermarket. This is true in the inner city and in rural communities. This is happening all across the country.

Mrs. Obama's efforts won her praise in a Wall Street Journal editorial. But they aroused my suspicions, in part because of my experience investigating for the New York Sun what the New York Times claimed was a "food crisis" in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. I was particularly skeptical of Treasury Secretary Geithner's plan to finance the new supermarkets using tax credits, and wrote, "I've been meaning to get to Philadelphia to check out this supermarket and, more importantly, ask other stores in the neighborhood how they feel about having their tax dollars taken to subsidize a new competitor that Mrs. Obama and the Treasury secretary like because it offers produce from local farmers."

I could have fact-checked Mrs. Obama without a trip to Philadelphia.

For one thing, a 2007 New York Times article previewing the opening of the store reported that, contrary to Mrs. Obama's 2010 depiction of a mother unable to access fresh fruit, Aleksandr Faynberg had been selling fresh fruit in the neighborhood from the back of a truck. The Times article was even illustrated with a photograph of Mr. Faynberg and the fruits and vegetables he was selling.

Stanford professor John B. Taylor, who was Under Secretary of Treasury for International Affairs from 2001 to 2005, has posted a copy of his speech to the annual joint lunch meeting of the American Economic Association and the American Finance Association. Highlights:

My research shows that the low interest rates set by the Fed in 2003-2005 added to the housing boom and led to risk taking and eventually a sharp increase in delinquencies, foreclosures, and toxic assets at financial institutions. The research also shows that a more rules-based federal funds rate would have prevented much of the boom and bust....

From Paul Krugman's latest New York Times column:

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society's winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It's only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That's what lies behind the modern right's fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.

There's no middle ground between these views.

Private sector job-creation! Two outgoing senators, Republican Robert Bennett of Utah and Democrat Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, are going to work for Washington law and lobbying firm Arent Fox, the Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney reports.

Bloomberg News has an article bemoaning what it says is the fact that brain surgeons and cancer researchers make less money than Wall Street traders. The article begins:

Wall Street traders discouraged by declining bonuses this month can take solace: They still earn much more than brain surgeons and top U.S. generals. An oil trader with 10 years in the business is likely to earn at least $1 million this year, while a neurosurgeon with similar time on the job makes less than $600,000, recruiters estimated. After a decade of deal-making, merger bankers take home about $2 million, more than 10 times what a similarly seasoned cancer researcher gets

The text is here. Pretty good speech, I thought, and I'm not generally a particularly big fan of the president. At least President Obama didn't reprise his "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun" comment recently noticed by, among others, Charles Krauthammer and Greg Mankiw.

Evergreen Solar is closing a $425 million plant in Massachusetts that had employed 800 people and had been built with the help of "$58 million in state grants, tax incentives and loans," the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports. The newspaper quotes the Republican leader of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Bradley Jones Jr., as saying, "Instead of focusing on stimulating one particular industry, Gov. Patrick and Lt. Gov. Murray should turn their attention to creating an economic climate where all businesses can succeed and thrive."

Evergreen says it's going to make the solar wafers in China, where it's cheaper.

Gristides supermarket chain owner John Catsimatidis has an op-ed piece in the Daily News trying to keep Walmart out of New York City. He writes that Walmart would have an adverse impact on smaller stores:

Nor should it be lost on us that many of these store owners are immigrants pursuing the American Dream, as I was when I started out. Not so of Walmart - so letting the huge retailer set up shop in New York will have an unavoidable anti-immigrant impact.

Who does Mr. Catsimatidis think shops and works at Walmart? Plenty of immigrants, believe me. Walmart might be bad for immigrant store-owners, but it might be good for immigrant shoppers and job-seekers. Just looking at it from the perspective of the immigrant store-owners without including the perspective of the immigrant shopper or job-seeker doesn't do justice to the full story of Walmart's impact on immigrants.

A Bloomberg News article about an effort by for-profit colleges to win the repeal of a 1998 law requiring them to get at least 10% of their revenue from outside the federal education department quotes Senator Harkin:

Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who chairs the Senate education committee and investigated student recruitment, job- placement claims and use of government funds by for-profit colleges, called the 90/10 rule "one of the few protections students at these schools have."

"Given the abuses that my committee has documented -- alarmingly high dropout rates and crushing debt loads for students -- the 90/10 rule clearly isn't enough," Harkin said in an e-mail. "I intend to look at ways to make it work more effectively to ensure that for-profit colleges put a renewed focus on the success of their students rather than the profits of their shareholders."

A little-noticed Delaware court case is raising concerns that a single judge may impose onerous responsibilities on businesses to preserve computer code that may be present in the "unallocated space" on disk drives.

The case, TR Investors, LLC v. Genger, involves two prominent personalities — Arie Genger, a businessman who served as a back channel between his friend Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and the George W. Bush administration, and Leo Strine, a Delaware Chancery Court judge who has been in the news lately for his role in adjudicating the dispute between Barnes & Noble's Len Riggio and investor Ron Burkle.

But the case, which is awaiting an appeal hearing, is attracting attention in some legal circles — though not yet in the mainstream press or from the public — less for the personalities involved than because of the concern that the judge may have imposed a compliance burden that, had it been suggested by a lawmaker or a regulatory agency, would have been the subject of resistance by business groups concerned about the potential cost or even technical feasibility.

A front-page news article in the Wall Street Journal, appearing under the headline "Goldman Opens Up To Mollify Its Critics," quotes exactly one individual who doesn't work at Goldman Sachs. That person is identified as "Charles Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware." The Journal doesn't tell its readers who John L. Weinberg was, whether he might have had anything to do with Goldman Sachs, or how the center came to be named after him.

"St. Joe: Short Sellers Win Round One as SEC Noses Around" is the headline of a Wall Street Journal Deal Journal item about the Florida real estate concern St. Joe that we wrote about back on October 14 in the post headlined "Einhorn Versus Berkowitz." If you had bought the stock back on October 14, at about $19, or in November, when it was down around $17, you would have made some money — the stock closed yesterday at about $23 a share and in pre-market trading this morning is down to around $21 a share. On October 13 Mr. Einhorn had announced the stock was worth $7 a share. It's somewhat remarkable that the Journal could characterize this course of events as a "win" for the short sellers.